m^^-^'- ' 



HISTORICAL GILEANIXGS 



A SERIES OF SKETCHES 



MONTAGU. WALPOLE. ADAM SMITH. 
COBBETT. 



BY 



JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS 



MACMTLLAX AND CO. 
1869 

\_All nghli reserved] 



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OXFORD: 

HY T. CUMBE, M.A., E. B. GARDNER, E. P. HALL, AND H. LATHAM, M.A. 
rKINTEKS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 

J Hz 



10 



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PREFACE. 



The object which I have before me in the follow- 
ing sketches^ is to present a set of historical facts^ 
grouped round a principal figure. The essays are 
in the form of lectures. Three out of the four were 
read at Newcastle-on-Tyne^ before the Philosophical 
Society ; and at Rochdale^ before the Pioneers. The 
fourth_, the subject of which is Walpole^ was read 
to an audience in University College, London. 

The history of the eighteenth century ought to 
have greater practical interest in the eyes of English- 
men than that of any other epoch in their annals. 
During this time, the political system of the country 
grew up, despite the imperfections which charac- 
terised the machinery of Parliament and the scandals 
which accompanied nearly every administration. The 
same century witnessed the growth of national wealth, 
in the expansion of this country's commerce and 
manufactures, despite the erroneous economical 
theories which found acceptance with most thinkers 
and almost every statesman. That negative side of 



vi PREFACE. 



politics and economy which gathers its inferences 
from the refutation of persistent fallacies^ and which 
therefore assists towards dissipating other delusions^ 
which are not yet abandoned, was developed in the 
first instance from the practice and the theory of 
the same age. 

If any writer could draw a series of sketches^ which 
might enable the general reader to arrive at a clear 
conception of the social and economical condition of 
our immediate ancestors,, he might make truth as 
entertaining as fiction^ and be instructive as well as 
agreeable. To effect such a result^ he will need 
certain powers. He must have skill in grouping his 
facts^ as well as the art of lively composition. But 
the chief part of his labour will consist in the collec- 
tion of materials. 

I can lay claim to no higher merit than that of 
diligent collection. I cannot assume that I have 
made the subjects which I am treating in the follow- 
ing pages as clear to my reader as they are to myself. 
But I am persuaded that the writer who possesses 
the gift of historical exposition, might follow the 
method pursued in these sketches with advantage^ 
and thus make the past live again to his reader. 

I have not undergirded my pages with a single 
note; have not cited the host of authorities to whom 
I am indebted for my facts. There is^ I think, a 
tiresome affectation in such a cumber of references, 



PREFACE. 



when the originals are open to tlie study of all. If 
I had to serve up a heap of strawherries on one 
dish_, I see no reason why I should g*ravely present 
my guest with a heap of stalks on another dish. 

I make no apology for the economical reasonings 
which are interspersed in these lectures. In treating 
any historical topic it is necessary to acknowledge 
wars and dynastic combinations, but the best part 
of historical teaching does not^ I think^ consist in 
the more prominent events which have occupied the 
attention of those who lived among such facts or who 
were their agents, but in expounding the moral and 
material progress of society^ and thereupon such parts 
of history as are too customary to attract superficial 
attention. It is very rarely the case that persons 
are able to form a just estirtiate of the time in which 
they are living. It is certain that the only means 
of arriving at even an imperfect estimate is to be 
obtained by a survey of society from its economical 
aspect. 

JAMES E. THOROLD KOGERS. 



Oxford, Jane 5, 1869. 



^ CHAELES MONTAGU, 

EARL OF HALIFAX. 



CHAELES MONTAGU, 

EARL OF HALIFAX. 



Ix 1658^ these islands were a great republic. 
Cromwell's administration made Great Britain more 
powerful in Europe than it had been since the days 
of the warrior Plantagenets. But the task which 
he had completed was in the highest degree arduous. 
The stars in their courses fought against him. His 
government was revolutionary^ and therefore costly. 
He had enemies among his own partisans^ for many 
of his companions in arms envied his elevation^ 
not a few^ more honestly^ believed that Oliver^s 
protectorate was a mischievous and indefensible 
usurpation. He was in daily peril of his life from 
his acknowledged foes. The stories told about the 
gloomy anxiety of the great Protector^s later years, 
malignant as they probably^ exaggerated as they 
certainly are^ are indirect testimony of the ceaseless 
plots which threatened him. Cromweirs reign was 
marked by a succession of l)ad seasons^ under which 
the nation was afflicted with severe dearth. But tlie 
throne of no monarch was^ if one may judge from 
the respect in which he was held; more glorious than 
his Highness^ chair of state. He constrained all 

B 2 



CHARLES MONTAGU, 



European monarchs to acknowledge him. He even 
arrested the arm of the Inquisition in the valleys of 
the Southern Alps. Charles, whom he had driven 
into exile, would have entered into negotiations with 
the illustrious usurper — would have even allied him- 
self with the principal author of his father's death. 
It is known that Cromwell suspended, or broke off 
these negotiations, because he believed that the royal 
wanderer would never forgive the great enemy of 
his house. But the exiles of a dynasty very rarely 
preserve their self-respect, and Charles Stuart was 
the least respectable among all the exiles of history. 
He wanted nothing but ease and pleasure, and we 
all know what his ease and pleasure were. 

Tbirty years after, the Revolution occurred, and 
a limited monarchy was established. There was an 
interregnum of two months between the day on which 
James lied from the kingdom, and Wilham was pro- 
claimed. We are told by more than one authority, 
that the republican party, which forty years before 
had overthrown the monarchy and the Church, was 
wholly extinct. Such a phenomenon has never been 
witnessed Ijefore. The war of American indepen- 
dence settled at once and for ever the form of political 
institutions in all new communities of Anglo-Saxon 
origin. The principle of social equality has survived 
all the other dogmas of that revolutionary propa- 
ganda in France which began its mission a century 
after the English settlement. But the great Puritan 
movement of the seventeenth century exhausted 



EAllL OF HALIFAX. 



itself in the efTort which gives it its place in English 
history. Like the volcanos of Auvergne^ it burnt 
itself out. The government of the Protector is as 
purely historical as the constitution of Athens or 
Rome. It is even more historical, for the traditions 
of ancient civilization still enter into modern habits 
of political thought. The stock arguments against 
republican institutions have been handed dow^i from 
the days of Plato. The code of ancient Rome is the 
core of European law. But the policy of the Pro- 
tectorate is, in so far as its influence on political 
thought goes, inftnitely more archaic than that of 
the republics of the ancient world. At the close of 
the seventeenth century, people thought that the re- 
publication of Milton^s Iconoclastes was an imper- 
tinence, and languidly asked whether it w^as likely to 
serve the present establishment in Church and State. 
For the fact is, no reaction was ever so absolute 
as the change from the era of the Rebellion to that 
of the Restoration. The heroes of the former epoch 
were earnest, stern, precise. Their sincerity was 
attested by the persecution which they had endured. 
Their discipline was perfected by the struggle in 
which they ultimately conquered. The purpose of 
their opposition to the King and his cavaliers must 
have been plainly before them, if not from the day 
of Eliot^s imprisonment and slow murder, at least 
from the time that Charles raised his standard at 
Nottingham. The character of the King made the 
struggle desperate, even unto death. Charles, like 



CHARLES MONTAGU, 



his son JameSj never forgave. But he was infinitely 
superior to his son in finesse^ or as a less courtly 
critic might say, in duplicity. 

It is not easy to discover the extent to which the 
nation took part in the great civil war. But it is 
certain that the real combatants were few. Before 
tlie armies joined battle at Naseby, it is said that 
a party of country gentlemen crossed the field with 
their hounds in full cry. Charles wondered that any 
of his subjects conld be neutral on that day. It was 
the neutrality of these men which restored the 
monarchy. Had the same impulses, the same pas- 
sions which moved Houndhead and Cavalier moved 
every Englishman, the victory of the former would 
never have been followed by reaction. 

If it be necessary to illustrate this statement, that 
the great Puritan party was numerically small, no 
better proof, I think, can be found than the fact that 
the capitular and episcopal estates, sold in the early 
days of the first revolution at fair market prices, were 
resumed for their ancient owners after the Restoration, 
without compensation. I know no parallel instance of 
this resumption. Henry tlie Eighth's courtiers se- 
cured tlieir grasp on the abbey lands, despite Mary's 
desire that they should be restored. Similarly, after 
the restoration of the Bourbons, it was impossible to 
recover the Church, or even the lay estates in France, 
wliirh the llevolution had confiscated and sold. A 
revolution must be superficial indeed which cannot 
secure a permanent title to its grantees. 



EAUL OF HALIFAX. 



It was because the leaders of the repiiblieau ]\arty 
were few^ and were trained under such exceptional 
circumstances, that they had no successors. The 
party was inevitably weakened by the efflux of time. 
Had the ^gi\Q, which carried Cromwell off at a com- 
paratively early age, been cured ; had his life been 
prolonged to the general duration ; his own comrades 
would have passed away, and his son would have 
succeeded to a quiet hereditary throne. This event 
was indeed in course of fulfilment. Never were 
Charles^ prospects worse than at the beginning of the 
year in which Oliver died. 

Meanwhile the clergy, whom Cromwell was obliged 
to conciliate, were alienating the laity by their dark 
fanaticism, their harsh discipline, their intolerant zeal. 
A statesman who affects to be a defender of the faith, 
is invariably unfriendly to public liberty. Xever 
since the Reformation was the State so much the 
handmaid of the Church as during the early days of 
the Protectorate. Men found that they had ex- 
changed the tyranny of the High Commission Court, 
of which they had heard, but of which they had 
rarely had experience, for a prying parochial inqui- 
sition, which controlled their daily life. These unre- 
corded grievances were far worse than the occasional 
persecutions of the monarchical courts. The English 
people has never submitted to clerical government 
as patiently as the Scotch has. What that govern- 
ment was, may be seen in the diaries of Cotton 
Mather and Shepherd, the ministers of the Massa- 



8 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

chusetts settlement under Governor Winthorp^ the 
men who burnt witches and hanged Quakers by the 
score. The harshness of the Presbyterian discipline 
was peculiarly galling to persons who might have 
otherwise acquiesced in the Protectorate. There were 
few who mourned for the ejected ministers of Bar- 
tholomew's Day 1662. The doctrine of these godly 
men might have been pure^ but the managers of the 
Hampton Court Conference^ the Morleys and Sheldons, 
were wiser in their generation^ when they restored epis- 
copal government, and with it the jolly^ genial parson ; 
and in place of the Kirk Session the Act of Uniformity. 
As the State and the Church of the Protectorate 
were exceptional^ so was the Court of the E^estoration. 
At kast let us^ for the sake of human nature^ hope 
so. The Cavaliers who formed the retinue of 
Charles, as he lived anxiously at Breda^ were as 
starved as they were licentious. Charles himself 
was familiar with penury. It is said that he had 
even experienced famine^ and that he retained after 
his restoration a strange fondness for putrid oysters, 
because this happened to be the dish with which 
he had once satiated the cravings of his hunger. 
These ravening and unclean creatures, when their 
master returned to England, flew upon the spoil like 
vultures. Charles^ court was one vast revel, a per- 
petual round of debauchery. It contained no modest 
woman^ no honest man. Everybody remembers the 
description which Evelyn gives of the last Sunday of 
Charles'' life. It was a feast of Cotytto, a worship of 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 



Aslitaroth. Everybody knows Pepys^ diary and the 
prudisli gossiping" way in which he tells the story of 
social life in England. Bnt the annalist of these revels^ 
the most polished among the satyrs and blacklegs 
and bullies of the restored throne^ was Grammont. 
No writer gives a clearer picture of the scene at 
Hampton and Tonbridge than this creature does. 
Those who can touch pitch with gloved hands may 
read his book, and may learn how gross w^as the 
pollution in which the nobles of the day wallow^ed, 
and from which they were very slowdy reclaimed. 
Where is the contrast to this picture? As Milton 
lived in Cripplegate, blind and poor, he must have 
realized in the court, Comus and his retinue, the 
first creation of his prophetic genius, as he drew, 
half unconsciously, in the most sublime and charac- 
teristic of his works, his own portrait, under the 
name of Samson, blind and with shorn locks, a 
captive grinding in the prison-house of the Philis- 
tines, while his persecutors were ''drunk with idolatry, 
drunk with wine.'' 

Charles the First and his son after him, had robbed 
the London merchants, the former of the money 
which they had deposited in the Mint under the 
guarantee of Government, the latter of what was 
an enormous sum in those days, no less than 
c^''i,328,526, and wdiich lay in the Exchequer. 
Charles shut up the Exchequer, but promised to ])ay 
six per cent, on the principal which he had a])i)ro- 
priated, as long as it was unpaid. It is hardly 



CHARLES MONTAGU, 



necessary to say that this promise was broken. No 
interest was paid for thirty years. But at the 
beginning' of the eighteenth century the government 
of AVilliam effected a compromise. The creditors of 
Charles agreed to take three per cent, on the prin- 
cipal^ the Government stipulating that they might 
redeem the debt on paying half the sum which had 
been seized. This, the oldest part of the National 
debt, for it is the only portion which was contracted 
before the Revolution, is still one of the public liabili- 
ties. But more than ten thousand families were 
ruined by this robbery. The motive for the act was 
as rapacious as the act was ruinous. 

Charles was in constant want of money. His 
pleasures,, and the accidents of these pleasures^ needed 
sustentation, the former immediately^ the latter by 
permanent provision. But Parliament^ whose loyalty 
was rather ardent than self-denying, was slow to 
gratify him, and inquisitive in its grants of supplies. 
Even in the first burst of affection which gushed 
forth at the time of the Restoration, the Cavaliers 
relieved their estates from feudal charges, as Cava- 
liers have done before and since, by levying taxes 
on the general public. They commuted the aids 
and reliefs, which constituted the conditions of the 
estates which they enjoyed, for the hereditary excise. 
The malt tax of the present day represents the expe- 
dient by which the landowners of the Restoration 
freed themselves from their ancient contributions to 
the public revenue. 



EAEL OF HALIFAX. ii 

As Parliament was unwilling to assist him^ 
Charles^ who shrank from no baseness^ became the 
willing* pensioner of Louis XIV. The price paid for 
this pension was the declaration of war against 
Holland. Charles was willing^ in order to gain the 
means for gratifying his infamous pleasures^ and for 
maintaining the wild orgies of his Courts not only to 
make war on his own nephew^ but to assist in the 
attempted subjugation of the Dutch provinces^ then^ 
as a century before^ the bulwark of the Reformed 
Keligion. Fortunately^ the attempt was frustrated. 
The defeat and dishonour which attended the English 
arms^ when our fleet was burnt in the Medway^ and 
our efforts against the heroic defenders of Amsterdam 
were foiled^ saved the English people in the end. It 
is a small matter to add^ that Holland had given 
Charles an asylum during the days of the terrible 
Protector^ where he could intrigue^ and where^ when 
he had funds^ he could hire his assassins in safety. 
It was only after years had passed that AVilliam of 
Orange learnt the t^rms of the bargain which Charles 
had made with Louis, and the plot which was in- 
tended to compass his destruction. It is not mar- 
vellous that he felt little compunction in dispossessing 
a kinsman who had taken part in these intrigues^ 
especially as he knew so well that the safety of 
Europe depended on the chastisement of Louis. 

The reaction of immorality during the age of Charles 
the Second was so complete that even men of other- 
wise stainless character were open to purchase. There 



12 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

is one name indeed^ that of Lord Russell, on which 
no charge of corruption can be fastened. But Sid- 
ney seems to have been in the pay of Louis. Mr. 
Kallam gives an odd justification of this relation 
between the French autocrat and the English re- 
pubhcan. He claims a moral distinction between a 
bribe taken to betray our principles, and a present 
taken in order to maintain them. One would think 
that under these abnormal circumstances^ there must 
at least have been a sympathy between the giver and 
the receiver^ and we know that there could have been 
no honest sympathy between Louis and Sidney. But 
the truth is this. When men walk with their lives 
in their hands^ as all public men did in England 
during the days of Oates and Dangerfield on the one 
hand^ Scroggs and Jeffries on the other^ they become 
strangely heroic^ or as strangely base. Of the former 
class were Bussell and Essex^ of the latter Shaftesbury 
and Marlborough^ and a host of other men. Most 
of the difficulties which William and his better 
supporters had to contend with arose from the men 
who had been trained in that perfidious school. 

There is no need that I should dwell in these 
prefatory remarks on the short and stormy reign of 
James the Second. Very few parts of English history 
are better known to Englishmen than the three 
years of that reign. The base Parliament of 1685, 
is remembered as the most infamous in our annals. 
James did everything to shock what loyalty was left 
towards the House of Stuart. He might indeed — 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 13 

for monarehs live in strang-ely constructed houses, 
in which more is seen of them than is the fact, and 
less is always known by them — have thought that 
the loyalty of that University of Oxford whicli ac- 
cepted the dedication of Sir George Mackenzie's Jus 
Regium, and endorsed it with their famous anathema 
on the twenty dogmas, which they pronounced to 
be false, seditious, and impious, was beyond suspicion 
of change. In 1709^ tlie House of Lords reversed 
this Academical judgment, by ordering the decree 
to be pubhcly burnt by the common hangman. 

James may have counted on this loyalty. But 
loyalty, amid the strife of factions, is a phrase which 
denotes satisfaction at that course of policy which 
rewards adherents. Loyalty, indeed, was entertained 
towards the House of Stuart^ but it was to be found 
among the gallant savages of the Highlands, among 
the desperate and persecuted outlaws of Irish bogs 
and mountains. When James attacked the freehold 
of the fellows of Magdalene, and threatened the High 
Church partisans with the Indulgence, these sturdy ad- 
vocates of his divine right fell from him, like autumn 
leaves in a tempest. Nor was this all. The disaffection 
of those who have been loyal, is incomparably more 
dangerous than the plots and sedition of those who 
have always been dissatisfied. The London Gazette 
of February 1688 is full of congratulatory addresses 
on the birth of the Prince of Wales. The London 
Gazette of February 1689 is as full of congratulatory 
addresses to William and Marv. Whi^^s and Tories 



14 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

who acquiesced in the new settlement^ agreed in brand- 
ing that chikl, whom a few months before they had 
welcomed as a choice gift from Heaven^ as supposi- 
titious, and in charging James with a fraud, of 
which, with all his faults, he was incapable. In 
his subsequent career, the old Pretender proved his 
legitimacy, by exhibiting all the characteristic in- 
competency, bigotry, and obstinacy of the House 
of Stuart. 

James, after his exile began, had a singular body 
of adherents. He had imprisoned the bishops for 
disobedience, and they had been acquitted. After 
his enforced abdication several of the prelates, with 
a considerable body of followers, declined to take 
the oath of allegiance to the new Settlement. It 
became necessary to dispossess them, a step which 
William was very reluctant to take. But they 
were treated with great, and I may add, with well 
deserved leniency. Though they were not loyal 
subjects, they were peaceable. If their principle of 
passive obedience dissuaded them from vowing alle- 
giance to AVilliam, it equally precluded them from 
active co-operation in Jacobite plots. This harmless 
secession, which seemed at first so dangerous, sur- 
vived for more than a century. Surprise has been 
expressed at its tenacious vitality. But travellers 
in the United States tell us, that there are small 
communities of American citizens whose settlement 
is two centuries old, but who have never cast a 
vote— passionate as is the habit of voting through- 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 15 

out the Union — because the President has never 
adopted the Solemn Leag'ue and Covenant. 

The real dang-er which the Revolution of 1688 
ran^ was the astonishing" treachery of the principal 
men in the State. Much of this was due to the 
school in which public men had learned, not a little 
to the conduct of William himself, his harsh manners, 
his attachment to his Dutch troops^ his intense and 
inconsiderate partiality for his Dutch courtiers and 
favourites. WiUiam ennobled and enriched the house 
of Bentinck^ a house which has been traditionally 
characterised by a stubborn and unforgiving will, 
but he intended to have heaped grants on his 
favourite w^th a prodigality which would have made 
him the richest subject, if not the richest personage 
in Europe. But the inveterate depravity of the 
nobles at the Revolution was William'^s chief diffi- 
culty. Various as the characteristics of these men 
were^ il^^y were at one in their greed, their dis- 
simulation, and their perfidy. Such men as Marl- 
borough, Admiral Russell, Godolphin, Carmarthen, 
were able and willing to paralyse any policy. It 
was due to such men as these that better terms 
were not i:^ot at the peace of Ryswick. It was 
because William was surrounded by such a crew 
that he was constrained to become his own minister, 
and to insist on a larger prerogative than any 
constitutional king has subsequently exercised. It 
was to counteract these persons that AVilliam dis- 
eovercKl and used the services of those men who 



i6 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

were faithful to him and his poUcy, and* among 
them of Charles Montagu, afterwards Baron and 
Earl of Halifax. 

When Shakespeare is describing the ragged regi- 
ment with which Falstaff declined to walk through 
Coventry, because even he was disgraced by so 
beggarly a militia^ he reckons among his hundred 
and fifty tattered prodigals ^ discarded serving-men, 
revolted tapsters^ ostlers trade-fallen, younger sons 
to younger brothers/ and speaks of them as 'the 
cankers of a calm world and a long peace/ What 
was true of the younger sons of younger brothers^ 
when military employment was not to be had, in 
the days of Shakespeare, was true in the days of 
William the Third, was true in Normandy eighty 
years later still. The only refuges for these victims 
of primogeniture were the army and the church. 
They did not expect command in the army, for many 
a gentleman of ancient descent, but impoverished 
substance, trailed a pike as a common soldier at 
Steenkirk and Landen, or at the siege of Namur. 
The Anglican Church, nearly two centuries ago, 
offered very little better prospects. It was im- 
poverished at the Reformation, and has become 
wealthy, if indeed endowments make it wealthy, 
from subsequent accidents. At that time however, 
the parson, and especially the chaplain, got the 
income of the butler, and was thought lucky if 
he married the lady^s maid of his patroness, or some 
lower dependant of his patron. He is the perpetual 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 17 

jest of the dramatists of the age, the Wycherleys, 
and Congreves, a!ul ^'^aiibrnglis, for his servility and 
his shifts, for his poverty and his chimsy attempts 
to ingratiate liimself with his patrons. It has been 
notieed tliat the only man of good deseent and sub- 
stanee who had taken orders between the Reformation 
and the Revolution, was Henry Compton, Bishop of 
London, who had been a cavalry officer, and who for 
a while reassumed that position at the Revolution, 
riding at the head of the guard of honour which 
escorted the Princess Anne to a place of safety, wdien 
she deserted her father in the autumn of 1688. 

The younger sons of the French nobility were 
better off up to the time of the French Revolution. 
The custom of primogeniture was not so strictly 
followed in France. The riches of the Church too 
were still unim])aired, and persons of good descent 
regularly took orders, and were nominated to abbacies. 
There is a story told of Turgot, the teacher and prede- 
cessor of Adam Smith, that when he had resolved 
again to become a layman, and abandon his prospects 
in the Gallican Church, his friends remonstrated 
with him. 'You are,'' they said, 'the younger son 
of a Norman nobleman, and therefore are poor. 
Your father is a man of great reputation, your 
relations are men of influence, and you will speedily 
be nominated to excellent abbacies. You will soon 
become a bishop. As easily you may be translated to 
a better see, as for example in Provence or Brittany. 
You will thus be able to realise your dreams of 

c 



1 8 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

administrative usefulness, and^ without ceasing to be 
a churchman, may be a statesman at your leisure/ 
It is needless to say that these ecclesiastics did 
little credit to their profession. One of them^ ex- 
pelled from France for his extraordinary profligacy, 
singular even in the bad age which I have described, 
became the tool, the spy, and at last the would-be 
murderer of Harley. But the Abbe Guiscard was 
by no means a unique scoundrel. 

In 1688, the Church was the only prospect before 
Charles Montagu. His father was George Montagu, 
his grandfather was the first Earl of Manchester. 
He was the fourth son of nine children. Born in 
1661, he was sent to Westminster at fourteen, then 
and for many years before and afterwards ruled by 
the famous Dr. Busby, who diligently instructed 
the minds, and ruthlessly cudgelled the bodies, of 
the ingenuous youth of the period. At sixteen, he 
was elected a King^s scholar, at twenty-one he was 
sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. It appears that 
his choice of University was determined by his 
attachment to a schoolfellow. At all events, he 
was fortunate. Had he gone to Oxford, he could 
have been sent to Christ Church, under the discipline 
of Dr. Fell, Dean and Bishop of the see of Oxford, 
a strenuous partisan of the Divine right of Kings 
and of passive obedience, and the advocate of the 
famous decree to which I have already alluded. As 
it was, he went to Cambridge, and became the pupil, 
as he was afterwards the patron^ of Sir Isaac Newton. 



EAEL OF HALIFAX, 19 

It may be mentioned that he eonstantly lived on 
terms of friendship with the great philosopher^ and 
that he left him a legacy in his will^ ^as a mark/ 
in his own language^ ^of the honour and esteem 
he had for so great a man/ 

At Cambridge^ ]\Iontagu cultivated what was 
called poetry^ as young men even now WTite rhymes 
at the Universities on set subjects. It appears that 
the trick of verse-making never left him, and that 
he tagged couplets together, and built up Pindaric 
odes to the day of his death. At least so Walpole 
says^ who is our best authority for the gossip of 
that time. Never perhaps was English poetry at 
a lower ebb. Milton had no followers^ no admirers 
even. He could have had no imitators. The poet 
of the age had been Cowley^ it was Dryden. Justice 
is still done to the vigorous style and active genius 
of that eminent writer, wdiose slovenliness in versi- 
fication only was imitated by his disciples. After 
Dryden^s death, Swift could quote almost every 
living versifier in order to illustrate his essay on 
the art of sinking in poetry. Few however of these 
poetasters were worse than Montagu. He was a 
generous man^ and lie patronized the rhymesters, 
as Lord Palmerston did Poet Close. Intending to 
honour him with their gratitude. Grub Street in- 
serted his compositions in its manifold collections 
of the British classics. It was a cruel kindness. 
^l\ audience will be able to judge of Montagu's 
merits as a versifier from a few specimens. 

c 2 



20 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

His earliest poem, written^ it appears^ at the request 
or command of the Cambridge authorities^ — Trinity 
College is a royal foundation^ and therefore officially 
puts on Court mourning, — ^is on the death of Charles 
the Second. There is little variety in the language 
which is used to extol the merits of deceased princes ; 
but our young poet was guilty of an inexcusable 
flattery when he writes of Charles as 

* The best good man that ever filled a throne ; ' 

and speaks of his ^ awful person/ when we know that 
the excessive ugliness of his face was relieved only 
by his habitual expression of good temper. Subse- 
quently he compares him to the Almighty and King 
David, and describes the political enemies of his 
youth as Sauls, who were ^ made great by wandering 
asses."* In a similar strain he tells us that ' the flying 
towers, with canvas wings,"* by which he means the 
mercantile marine of the day, whose development he 
most unfairly ascribes to Charles, are the means by 
which the English 

* In Persian silks, eat Persian spice, secure 
Prom burning fluxes and their calenture ;' 

a couplet in which one is at a loss which to admire 
the most — the conceit, the geography, or the physi- 
ology. He concludes his poem by saying — 

^ James is our Charles in all things but in name ; 
Thus Thames is daily lost, but still the same.' 

Five years later, Montagues maturer powers were 
employed in congratulating William, in even worse 



KARL OF HALIFAX. 21 

verses^ on the victory of the Boyne. Thus lie writes 
about the passage of the river — 

* Precipitate they plun!:]:e into the flood ; 

In vain the waves, tlie banks, the men withstood : ' 

and of William — 

' The King leads on ; the King does all inflame ; 
The King — and carries millions in his name.* 

I will make but one more quotation^ his description 
of ^lary — 

* As danger did approach, her spirits rose, 
And, putting on the King, dismayed his foes. 
Now, all in joy, she quits the cheerful Court ; 
In every glance descending angels sport.' 

This, you W\\\ agree with me, is sad stuff, and only 
worthy of a prosaic economist. I know but one 
apology for it, that in those days Locke professed a 
profound admiration for the genius of Sir Richard 
Blaekmore. 

There is one composition, the joint work of Mon- 
tagu and a far wittier person, Matthew Prior, which 
will live side by side with the poem which it parodies. 
\ATien Dry den joined the Roman communion, he 
testified his gratitude to James, and his attachment 
to his new creed, by composing a poem, the conception 
of which is transcendently absurd, though the exe- 
cution is as meritorious as that which characterises 
any other of Dryden^s works. Under the figure of a 
Hind and a Panther, the converted wit and man of 
letters typified the Roman and the English Churches. 



2 2 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

The Hind invites the Panther to her cave^ and there 
discourses on Church history^ discipline^ and dogmas, 
on the authority of general councils, of kings, and of the 
Pope. The Panther, who ought to be convinced, goes 
away unconverted ; and, instead of being so gnawed 
by the pangs of hunger during this long and tedious 
lecture as to devour her fellow-controversialist, leaves 
the milk-white Hind civilly and harmlessly. Never 
was fable composed which was open to more measure- 
less ridicule. It was travestied by Montagu and 
Prior under the title of The Town and Country Mouse. 
This performance gained Montagu the friendship 
of Lord Dorset, and opened him a career, when he 
was still hovering between the rival misery of the 
Church and the Bar. 

About ninety of the Upper House of Parliament, 
some being bishops, all who had sat in any Parlia- 
ment of Charles the Second, the Lord Mayor and 
about fifty of the Common Council, met on December 
26, 1688, after the King^s flight, and requested the 
Prince to issue writs for the summons of a Convention 
Parliament. To this Convention, which met on 
January 22, Montagu was returned, and in this Con- 
vention the abdication or forfeiture of King James 
was formally affirmed ; William and Mary were in- 
vested with the Crown. We may be certain that the 
young statesman acquitted himself well, for the King 
forthwith presented him with a pension of<^5oo. 
For a time, this was the way in which the Court 
rewarded its adherents in Parliament. The severity 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 23 

which debars the recipient of a pension — some few 
cases excepted — from sitting in the House of Com- 
mons, was adopted in order to check this practice. 
Tlie expedient — one of the days of Queen Anne — 
was only outwardly successful^ for Walpole contrived 
to obtain and secure partisans by the distribution of 
secret bribes. 

When Montagu was thirty years old he managed 
a conference of the Commons with the House of 
Lords. Both political parties in the Legislature^ not 
the leasts probably^ because of the insecurity of the 
new settlement, were anxious to define anew the law 
of treason^ and to enact an amended course of pro- 
cedure. Up to this time^ that terrible law had been 
administered after the statute of Edward the Third, 
corrected by another of Edward the Sixth, and 
expounded by the practice of some of the very worst 
judges in the very worst times. The trials of Lord 
Strafford and Archbishop Plunket^ on the one hand ; 
of Russell, Sidney, and College on the other, in the 
time of Charles the Second, were murders carried out 
under forms of law, and in defiance of plain justice. 
It was everybody's interest to amend the written 
law, and to define anew what should be the practice 
of the Court. The Lords insisted on securing some 
special privileges to their order; the Commons de- 
murred^ and Montagu, as I have said, managed the 
conference. For a time, the dissentients could not 
agree^ and the bill was lost. Ultimately, however, 
the Lower House conceded the demands of the Ui)per. 



24 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

The skill which Montagu exhibited in this and 
similar kinds of public business^ his readiness in 
debate, and his painstaking, methodical manner, soon 
marked him for that kind of official life, skill in which 
was absolutely necessary for the support of the Re- 
volution, skill of which at that time he was the sole 
master. Montagu was the father of English finance. 
He pledged, and pledged successfully, the public 
credit. He furthered the project which established 
the Bank of England. He thwarted Harley and the 
Tories in their attempt to degrade the currency in 
1695. But his greatest effort of financial genius was 
the happy audacity which invented and circulated 
Exchequer bills. 

It is a saying of Macaulay, that public debts were 
not contracted for the first time at the Revolution; 
but that the responsible Government which com- 
menced at that epoch commenced also the practice of 
paying them. Henry the Third borrowed of the Pope, 
then and for generations afterwards, the greatest capi- 
talist in Europe. Edward the Third borrowed of the 
Genoese and Florentine merchants, and failing to 
pay, ruined these traffickers. The later Plantagenet 
and the Tudor kings borrowed of their subjects and 
repudiated their debts. Twice in his reign Henry 
the Eighth, the most lavish and reckless of English 
kings, was relieved of his debts by Parliament, taking 
with grim pleasantry the benefit of the Act. When 
these resources failed, Henry debased the currency, 
and dragged this country down from being one of 



KAUL OF HALIFAX. 



the Diost opulent into beiny tor a century one of the 
poorest states in Europe. The brilliant historian of 
Henry's reign tells us that this transaction was ol' 
the nature of a loan. I apprehend^ if a bur<j;'lar or 
a footpad thinks proper to say that he has borrowed 
your plate-chest or your purse^ that he has not 
materially modified the transaction by the use of this 
euphemism. The Stuarts, as I have said^ did not 
go throng'li the form of borrowing — they sim])ly 
robbed the merchants and the goldsmiths, and through 
them the widow and the orphan. 

The Government of the Revolution borrowed money, 
but saved public credit. They loaded posterity with 
debt, but they made good faith traditional in the 
administration of public affairs. The fact is, re- 
sponsibility is the guarantee of a public conscience. 
Governments which are irresponsible, governments, 
that is to say, wdiicli only command a minority of 
public opinion, are dangerous to the morality of a 
community, however brief their duration. If they 
lasted long, they w^ould be fatal to public honour. 
History is full of examples, near and remote, of this 
trutli. It signifies nothing what the form of govern- 
ment is, whether the faction be dominant in a repub- 
lic, hold its grip by the machinery of a military 
despotism, or have an accidental existence under a 
constitutional monarchy. 

At the close of the seventeenth century, the richest 
county in England, after ^liddlesex, was Norfolk. 
\ork followed^ but Lancashire stood only twenty- 



26 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

eighth on the list. There were three and a-half 
acres to each house in Middlesex^ twenty-eight and 
a-half to each house in Lancashire. At present^ the pro- 
portion is about two-thirds of an acre in Middlesex^ 
three in Lancashire^ and Lancashire stands^ by its 
acreage^ second in point of opulence to the metropo- 
litan county. The great centres of industry, where the 
northern population of these islands is now gathered^ 
were then open moors, wet pastures. The inhabit- 
ants, no doubt, led a monotonous life, for they lived 
in a damp climate, and were contiguous to a melan- 
choly ocean. Lord Dudley had just begun to dis- 
cover the use of pit coal in smelting Staffordshire 
iron; but the best bars came from the Sussex forges. 
The rails round St. PauFs Cathedral were made from 
the iron of the Wealden. The cloth manufacture was 
scattered over England. Defoe tells us that its prin- 
cipal localities in the southern counties were Farn- 
ham_, Alton^ Guildford^ and Readings towns known 
now for other industries^ if known at all. Even in 
those days,, however^ Newcastle was conspicuous for 
its glass trade^ for the ^ London Gazette'' contains 
frequent advertisements of quarries^ selling at from 
13.S. to 10.9. the hundred feet. 

The ^ London Gazette^ of the time was published 
by authority twice or thrice a week. It is a single 
leaf, of small folio size^ printed generally in small 
type and in double columns. On the one side is 
foreign intelligence, on the other a short and very 
succinct account of domestic matters. The last column 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 27 



contains the advertisements. Tliese are of the ordi- 
nary character. Notices of library sales; of new- 
books; of picture sales; of quack medicines, Ander- 
son's Scotch pills figuring constantly ; rewards offered 
for runaway negroes, and deserters from Colonel This 
or That^s regiment; of auctions by inch of candle; 
of patents and inventions. I must not occupy your 
time with these items. The Government advertise- 
ments, printed in italics, head the list, and generally 
refer to changes in the service of the post, and to 
contracts for timber. Thus the public is informed 
that, as the Tunbridge season has commenced, there 
\\\\\ be a daily post from London, except on Sundays ; 
again, that a bi-weekly post has been established for 
Burton-on-Trent, and that a weekly stage coach to 
Lincoln has been set up for the summer. While 
the fleet was at the Nore, in the spring of 1692, a 
mail-bag was also dispatched thither daily. Among 
stranger advertisements I may mention one of a trades- 
man in York Buildings, who informs his readers that 
he is ready to dig up, embalm., and transport from 
Ireland the bodies of Englishmen of quality who had 
fallen there ; of an Italian lady who sings in the same 
place ; of a book which gives an account of the value 
of artificial grasses newly introduced to England, such 
as ray, clover, saintfoin, and lucerne, and oilers them 
for sale at the ' Fleur de Luce,^ opposite to the May- 
pole, in the Strand. And, lastly, in the ^ Scotch 
Mercur}"^ of May 8th, 1692, is the assurance of pro- 
tection given by the King^s Privy Council in Scotland 



2 8 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

to the Highlanders of Glencoe^ the tardy repentance 
for the atrocious deed of Breadalbane and Stair. 

The' popular periodical of the time appears to have 
been a publication like ^ Notes and Queries/ or even 
more like the correspondents^ page of the ^ Family- 
Herald/ Questions were sent to a bookseller, and 
after a short interval the printed question and its 
answer were published. These questions are theo- 
logical and scientific^ or deal with love^ courtship^ and 
marriage. At intervals a title-page and index are 
given^ in order that the single sheets may be bound 
into a volume. Nothing,, however^ was printed which 
corresponds to the modern newspaper press. 

This is not the place in which to discuss the jus- 
tification which is commonly alleged for that burden 
of a public debt which our forefathers put upon us. 
It is sufficient to say^ in the first place^ that the 
heritage was far greater than the burden^ and that, 
even if the statesmen of the age were in error when 
they strained every nerve to adjust the balance of 
power^ they must, like the statesmen of every age, be 
judged by their motives. At this time, at least, we 
may do them the justice to assert that they were 
seriously alarmed for religion and liberty when they 
resisted the aggrandisement of Louis, and that it was 
necessary to break off that dangerous intimacy be- 
tween the French treasury and leading Englishmen 
which Louis furthered, and to which Barillon was 
the go-between. In the next place, there was the 
plea of necessity. Mr. Hallam alludes to the fact that 



EAUL OF HALIFAX. 29 

the customs and excise duties in 1693 had dwindled 
to less than half their amount before the llevo- 
lution. But this author was not at the pains to 
discover the reason^ because^ like most historians, lie 
has ignored the economical side of the events which 
he comments on. During the six years 1686-91 
wheat was worth on an average 34^. the quarter; 
during the next six years, the average was 6o.v. Gd. 
The inevitable consequence followed. As the indi- 
rect sources of revenue were diminished under the 
pressure of this dearth, it became necessary to sup- 
plement them by direct taxation, in the form of a tax 
of twenty per cent, on real and personal estate. If 
the financier of the age burdened posterity with a 
debt, it must be admitted that he did not spare the 
existing generation. 

In 1691, Montagu was made a Lord of the Trea- 
sury and Cliancellor of the Exchequer. His first 
great act was one of singular boldness. For some 
time past the silver coin had been in a deplorable 
condition. It was so worn and clipped that a guinea 
was worth thirty shillings in silver, counted by tale. 
It was necessary to restore the currency, but on tliis 
occasion, as afterwards in 1815, the country gentle- 
men, with Harley at their head, proposed that the 
new coins should be issued at the average weight to 
which the old currency had been reduced. Tlie exj^e- 
dient would have been at once an act of l)ankru]>tey 
and an act of robber}', — the former because it would 
have defrauded creditors, the latter because it w(juld 



CHARLES MONTAGU, 



have mulcted persons wlio were in receipt of fixed 
sums^ or of such wages as are not settled by com- 
petition. The proposal was rejected. 

The other part of Montagu'^s re-coinage scheme was 
of more doubtful prudence. He determined that those 
who deposited their clipped and worn money in the 
Mint should have new money of full weight in ex- 
change. As a matter of abstract justice^ it is clear 
that the act of coinage^ being a service which the 
Government does for the public^ and being a certi- 
ficate of the fineness contained in the pieces issued^ 
the Exchequer should not be called on to bear the 
loss of wear, still less losses by fraud. It was plain^ 
too^ that having fixed a date at which the coin should 
be received at the Mint_, and having made the date 
a somewhat distant one, Montagu created two evils — 
one a sudden abstraction of the currency in circula- 
tion, another a strong temptation to still further clip 
and mutilate the coin. It is certain that the latter 
temptation was yielded to. The aggregate loss to 
the nation from this transaction was not less than 
cf 3,000,000, nearly £8,500,000 having been brought 
into the several mints set up in London and else- 
where. 

The justification for this lavish act was the dis- 
content which it was believed would be entertained, 
if the worn and clipped money had been taken by 
weight. The Government was in a most precarious 
situation, the expenditure was great, and, as I have 
observed before, the harvests were unpropitious. 



EABL OF HALIFAX. 



31 



There are those among" ns who can remember tlie 
nuisance whieli tlie lig-ht sovereig-ns were some 
fifteen years ag-o. It would appear liowever from a 
paper lately read in London on the g"old circulation 
of Great Britain^ that the people who mulcted the 
public for light gold, sent the sovereigns back into 
general circulation and at their full value^ inuncdi- 
ately after the panic was over. 

Part of the difficulty which ensued from the 
abstraction of the currency during the process of 
re-coinage^ was met by the establishment of the Bank 
of England. The projector of this was a Scotchman, 
one Paterson, who afterwards wrecked his fortunes, 
and those of many others, in the unlucky Darien ex- 
pedition. The place in which these hapless but 
venturesome Scots thought proper to found a colony, 
is one of the most unwholesome under the canopy of 
heaven. It has its rivals in Massowah, the feierrhna 
causa of the late Abyssinian War, and Sierra Leone, 
the chosen home of fever. These places were at that 
time unknown to our countrymen. The settlers 
perished like sheep. It is an illustration of tlie 
feeling which persons have entertained as to the 
responsibility of government, that this failure, due 
to natural causes, was ascribed for a long time to 
the jealousy of the English, and that the Scotcli 
made it a condition, at the negotiations wlnCli led 
to the Union, that the loss of the Darien exjK'dition 
should, in part, be made good. Michael (iodfrey, 
the first governor of the Bank of England, insisted 



32 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

on accompanying* William to the siege of Namur, 
and on needlessly sharing his dangers. He was 
killed in the trenches. 

Those who are familiar with the present operations 
of the Bank of England^ and the influence which 
the rate of its discount has^ not only on the home 
trade but on the markets of the mercantile world, 
would smile at the beginnings of the House in 
Threadneedle Street. In this day_, the money market 
of which the Bank of England is the centre^ has 
greater interest to more men than the rise and fall 
of empires have. The excommunication of the Stock 
Exchange is far more terrible^ because far more 
immediately effectual, than the interdict of the pope 
or the ban of the empire ever were. The price 
which is paid for the insertion of a stock in the 
broker^s list^ is incomparably higher than that which 
a parvenu pays the Heralds^ College for a pedigree 
and a shield. Unluckily^ the certificate is sometimes 
a cloak for fraud. 

In those early days^ the Bank had to struggle for 
existence. It was under the patronage of the Whigs, 
William being a subscriber of £iOfiOO stocky as 
Chamberlain^s abortive land bank was under that of 
the Tories. But as its issues were based on public 
securities,, they were often at a discount^ even though 
they bore a high rate of interest. Droll stories are 
told by Mr. Francis^ the chronicler of the Bank of 
England, as to the raids which it made on its rivals^ 
and how these rivals organised a run upon it^ and 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 



33 



how the old Duchess of INIarlborouo-h opened her 
hoards^ to aveno-e liorself on lior political focs^ and 
sustain the credit of an imperilled estal)lishment. 
With that woman, revenge was a stronger passion 
than avarice^ thongh her avarice was proverl)ial. 

In 1696 tlie credit of the Government had reached 
its lowest ebb. Tallies on the Exchequer were at 
from 30 to 60 per cent, discount ; Bank notes at 20, 
and a general bankruptcy seemed imminent. The 
process of providing the new currency was being 
carried out, but the want of money was sorely felt. 
In this crisis, jNIontagu devised the expedient of 
Exchequer bills^ partly as a floating debt^ partly to 
meet the deficiency of the currency. They bore no 
interest at firsts and were for very small sums. But 
they were receivable in payment of taxes^ and if 
reissued from the Exchequer, were to carrj^ interest 
at ^(L per cent, per diem^ i.e. £"] 12s, per annum. 
The effect of this expedient was almost magical. 
Credit revived^ (perhaps the cessation of the war had 
something to do with this desira1}le result^) and from 
that time forward^ the issue of Exchequer bills has 
been the form in which Government gets its first 
credit from the House of Commons. Unfortunately, 
the prevailing immorality of the period led to a dis- 
honest use of these instruments, and several persons 
were implicated in a fraudulent issue of Exchequer 
bills. Two representatives con^^cted of this crime 
were expelled the House of Commons. The House 
resolved to punish DuncomT^e, the Receiver-General 

D 



34 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

of the Excise^ and passed a bill levying a fine of 
.^400^000 on this person and his associates^ but the 
Duke of Leeds contrived that the bill should drop in 
the Lords. Long experience had made the Duke an 
adept in the art of bribery. Detection could not make 
him more infamous. 

In 1699, Montagu was created Baron Halifax_, and 
was made First Commissioner of the Treasury. He 
had risen, by dint of sheer industry and keen business 
faculties^ to the post of prime minister^ at the age of 
thirty-eight. Eleven years before^ the offer of a 
living of .^150 a year would have determined his 
career. Now he was a peer, chief minister, had 
secured certain solid favours from William, and had 
obtained grants of sinecure offices for himself, his 
brother^ and his nephew. Of course his prosperity 
procured him some enemies^ his vanity and arrogance 
made him more. But an attempt to impeach him 
in 1702 failed^ after he had lost his oflSce^ on the 
accession of Anne. From that time till 1708^ he 
was one of the junto^ his political associates being 
Somers^ Wharton^ Orford^ and Sunderland. The 
insolence of the Duchess of Marlborough and the 
clamour against Sacheverel'^s impeachment ejected 
Halifax from power^ and set Harley and St. John at 
the head of affairs. But the amity of St. John and 
Harley was based on no better foundation than that 
personal ambition which soon degenerates into sordid 
rivalry^ and despite the efforts of Swift^ these two 
persons came to a rupture^ in the last year of Anne'^s 



EARL OF HALIFAX, 35 

reign. The treasurer was compelled to resign his staff 
on July 2 7tli^ iJH^ having been virtually a cipher 
in the administration for a twelvemonth previously. 
A cabinet council^ which Anne attended^ was held 
the same day. It was at once determined to put the 
Treasnry into the hands of a commission of five. But 
the ministry could agree to no other name than that 
of Wyndham^ and broke up at two in the mornings 
without arriving at ajiy decision. The fatigue of 
this debate was fatal to the Queen. She was seized 
with apoplexy or gout in the head^ and^ after a short 
rallv, died on the First of Au^rust. 

The Queen^s sudden or at least unexpected deaths 
broke down the hopes of the Jacoljites. Atterbury 
alone gave bold counsels. He advised Bolingbroke 
to proclaim the Pretender at once. But the Secre- 
tary shrank from the risk. ' There/ said Atterbury^ 
^goes the best cause for want of a little courage.'' 
The circumstances of the first council^ held after the 
Queen''s deaths are well known. The Whig leaders 
insisted on being present^ and confounded their 
opponents; George was proclaimed, and a regency 
administered public affairs during the King^s absence. 
The Jacobites were furious. They knew the risk 
before it was a certainty. Lady Masham, whose 
fortunes departed with her power^ railed at Harley 
on the last dav of July with ag-gravated feminine 
bitterness^ declaring that he had neither sense nor 
honesty, though when she wrote, Dr. Arljuthnot 
entertained hopes of the Queens's life, and continued 

D 2 



36 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

to hope (his judgment bemg bewildered by his 
anxieties), up to within a few hours of her death. 
Tlie council had sent for Radcliffe^ then reputed 
the most sagacious physician in England. Radcliffe 
declined to come on some pretext or the other, and 
was charged with having let the Queen die by 
default. A friend of Radcliife^s moved in the House 
(for the physician was a member of Parliament), that 
he should be summoned to his place, and censured 
for negligence; but the motion was negatived. 
RadcliflPe defended himself, partly by his previous 
plea, partly by saying that he knew the danger of 
attending crowned heads, unless under a certificate of 
indemnity ; and then complained characteristically of 
the ill usage shown him by a friend with vrhom ^ he 
had drunk many hundred bottles.^ In three months 
the physician died, his end having been, it seems, 
hastened by the unpopularity which he underwent, 
and in those days, by the dangers which unpopularity 
involved. 

Bolingbroke was capable of intrigue, but not of 
action. He could cabal with the backstairs, worry 
his colleagues, negotiate with the men of letters who 
were of his party, and debauch as far as possible the 
House of Commons. Immediately on the Queen^s 
death, he writes to Swift, begging him to remain 
in England and assist his party ; laments the ^ banter- 
ings of fortune ; ' states that the Tories are resolved 
not to be crushed, and that this is enough to pre- 
vent such a catastrophe ; addresses in that punctilious 



EARL OF HALIFAX, 37 

age Swift as ^dear Jonathan;^ and concludes his letter 
with a characteristic postscript — ^ The Whigs are 11 
pack of Jacobites, and that shall l)e the cry in a 
month/ People talk of the versatility of knaves, 
but political knavery has few ex2:)edients, and the 
chief trick it uses is that of charging opponents with 
its own vile purposes. It is no wonder that in a few 
days Swift^s Jacobite correspondents could wTite to 
him, that the earth has never produced sucli monsters 
as Bolingbroke, Harcourt, and Atterbury ; the writer 
of one letter having been intelligent enough to 
predict the history of parties so accurately as to say, 
that ' if the King keeps some Tories in employment, 
the notion of Whig and Tory will be lost, but that 
of court and country will arise/ What was really 
felt at the crisis is seen by the fact, that stocks rose 
as soon as it became manifest that the law of the 
Hanoverian succession would be respected. 

After the death of Anne, Halifax was again made 
First Lord of the Treasury, and raised to the dignity 
of an earl. But he did not long enjoy this later 
elevation. He was suddenly taken ill on Sunday, 
May 15th, 17 15, and died on the following Thursday. 

I cannot allow myself to omit all mention of one 
act in the public life of Halifax, his successful resist- 
ance to the Occasional Conformity Bill of i 702. The 
object of this measure, which the reactionary Par- 
liament of Anne strove to carry, was to distress the 
Dissenters. It provided that if any person holding 
an office of trust, for the occupatimi of which it was 



38 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

necessary to take the Sacrament^, should attend at 
a Dissenters^ meeting-house, he should be disabled 
from his employment^ and be fined a hundred pounds, 
with five pounds a day additional, as long as^, having 
committed the offence^ he remained in office. The 
management of the bill was put into the hands of 
Bromley and St. John_, the first a violent bigot^ the 
second notorious for his naked scepticism and his naked 
l)olitical apostasy. Halifax managed the conference 
on the part of the House of Lords^ and^ for once in 
the political history of England^ had nearly all the 
Bishops with him^ arrayed on the side of good sense 
and toleration. As the Lords were resolute in their 
resistance to it^ the bill dropped. It was on this oc- 
casion that Defoe wrote his ^Shortest Way of Dealing 
with Dissenters/ He was adjudged to stand in the 
pillory for two hours^ to be imprisoned in Newgate^ 
and to pay a fine of £200. But the London Non- 
conformists covered the pillory with laurels^ pelted 
their advocate with flowers^, and drank to him in 
silver cups. In 1711^ Nottingham contrived to enact 
this measure of persecution, at the instance of Boling- 
broke; but it was repealed in 1719, when Boling- 
broke was in exile, and the Whigs were in the 
ascendant. The Whigs of George the First^s days, says 
Lord Stanhope, were really the Tories of a later date; 
the Tories Whigs. It is difficult to discover any re- 
semblance beyond such as might appear to the anxious 
eye of a partisan, when one recollects the persons 
who supported this atrocious act of persecution. 



EARL OF HALIFAX, 39 

The accession of Anne had been foll(nved by a poli- 
tical reaction. Fortunately for the principles of the 
Revolution^ Louis the Fourteenth acknowledged 
the son of James the Second on the death of his 
father^ and in contravention of the treaty of Ryswick. 
Anne was therefore constrained to defend her crown^ 
and to maintain the principles which her courtiers 
and she secretly abhorred. Hence the Tories were 
continually compelled to uphold that which they 
detested^ and to intrigue against their avowed prin- 
ciples. Nothing was so fatal to the hopes of the 
exiled Jacobites as the ill-considered recognition of 
James. Had it not been for this events the reaction 
might have triumphed. As it was^ its only fruit 
was the nonsense of Dr. Sacheverel^ the rival intrigues 
of the waiting-women, the Duchess of ]\Iarlborough 
and Lady jMasham^ the victory of the latter, because 
such a victory was necessarily won by the most 
supple and compliant, and the defection of Harley 
and Bolingbroke from the Whig party. 

In the autumn of 17 10 a clergyman, of English 
descent, but who was born in Ireland, and who had 
been presented to a benefice in thaC island, came 
to London, ostensibly for the purpose of furthering 
certain interests of the Irish Church. He had been 
long known as one of the most active and vigorous 
political writers of the time, and his assistance had 
been eagerly courted by both parties. But Swift was 
unforgiving. The Whigs, shocked, or pretending to be 
shocked, by the coarse profanity contained in his ^Tale 



40 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

of a Tub/ had withstood his preferment in the Church. 
Even Wharton,, profligate as he was^ was justified 
in sayings ^ We must not encourage this fellow ; we 
liave not character enough ourselves/ So Swift com- 
plained of the coldness of Somers^ and the treachery 
of Halifax^ and the bad faith of Berkeley, and the 
unprincipled character of Wharton^ and resolved to 
desert them. Besides^ Swift was shrewd. He saw 
that the Whig party was discredited; that the re- 
action consequent on Sachevere^s trial was ruining 
their fortunes^ when he was bent on bettering his 
own. He came to London^ found Godolphin^s ad- 
ministration tottering to its fall^ and instantly deter- 
mined on the party to which he should adhere. It 
w^as in vain that Halifax entertained him at Hampton 
Courts and invited him to his country seat. Swift 
kept up a close friendship with only one of the Whigs. 
But Addison was popular with everybody. ^If/ says 
Swift^ speaking of the Essayist^s election for Malmes- 
bury, ^ he had a mind to be chosen king^ he could 
hardly be refused.'' 

I have spoken of the instruction which the curious 
may obtain as to the Court of the Bestoration by 
a perusal of Grammont^s Memoirs. A similar picture, 
though drawn by the hand of a greater master, is 
to be found in Swift^s Journal to Stella. The coarse 
frivolities of fashionable life, the endless intrigues of 
court lackeys and court waiting- women, the bustle 
of the Treasurer's levee, the suppers at taverns, the 
card-parties at Mrs. Manley's, the Mohawks of Covent 



EAEL OF HALIFAX, 41 

Garden, the quarrels and the duels, the gossip and 
the scandal of the town, are all faithfully described 
in the plainest possible English, through a series of 
letters to the young lady whose relations to Swift 
were then equivocal, and which remain to our days, 
since history has seldom leisure for private scandal, 
eminently mysterious. 

The Queen, who was to be wheedled into whatever 
policy seemed most convenient for the ambition of 
her ministers, made no very considerable figure in 
the drama. She had merely exchanged the tutelage 
(>f Sarah Duchess of Marlborough for that of Abigail 
Lady Masham. Other monarchs have been governed 
by confessors : Anne shaped her policy by the whims 
of her favourite waiting- woman. Swift saw her when 
he was using his pen on behalf of her ministers, as 
Johnson saw her in his childhood, when she touched 
him for the King's evil — a fat, gouty, lethargic 
woman, in black velvet and diamonds. 

The most mysterious man of that time was Harley, 
the Prime Minister. Before he reached this dignity, 
he had been Speaker of the House of Commons. 
Bred a Dissenter, he became the chief of the High 
Tory party. Introduced into the Cabinet in 1704, 
as a AVhig, and made Secretary of State, he carried 
with him St. John, another AVhig, as Secretary at 
War. Both intrigued against Godolphin and Marl- 
borough, through the assistance of Mrs. Masham, 
and were forced to retire from office in 1708; ^^^ 
the statesman and the soldier threatened to resign 



42 CHARLES MONTAGU, 

their places unless these cabals were repudiated. But 
Harley after his dismissal, intrigued again through 
the same channel^ and ultimately succeeded in eject- 
ing Godolphin^ and occupying his office. He held 
this place to within a few days of the Queen^s death. 
Almost every man in England^ who thought on the 
matter^ believed that the sole object which Harley had 
before him was the restoration of the Stuarts. Boling- 
broke thought so^ and committed himself finally^ and for 
himself fatally^ to the project. But George succeeded 
at Anne^s death quietly^ though absent from England ; 
nor, when the conduct of the ministers was impeached 
after the accession of the Hanoverian line^ was Harley 
found to have played false to any but those who 
had believed in his reputed opinions. Even these 
people had no other proof than the strength of their 
own presumption. Harley never committed himself. 
To a moral certainty he would have been exposed^ 
had he done any overt act of political apostasy ; for 
the Whigs were not likely to be tender of public 
reputations after the Scotch rising of 17 15. 

Beyond doubt^ Harley had consummate art in the 
most difficult and delicate of all finesse^ the manage- 
ment of the House of Commons. He quarrelled with 
no man^ had a kind word for everybody. ^ Don^t 
come to my levee/ he said to Swift^ ^ I have no 
friends there.^ He dropped in to parties^ and chatted 
familiarly with every one he met. He rallied his 
acquaintances as though they had been friends. His 
kindness of manner to his reputed friends knew no 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 43 

bounds. He called Swift ^Presto/ and Swift was as 
proud of the name as if it had been a peerage. Swift, 
the most jealous, vain^ exacting of men^ never sus- 
pected that Harley used him as a mere political tool. 
Harley had no policy, and was therefore able to say 
that any expedient was his original purpose. He ridi- 
culed Sacheverel, the Murphy of the day, and gave 
him secret support. He was on good terms with the 
Jacobites, but he was also on good terms with the 
House of Hanover. The former believed that he 
would restore ^ the King/ the latter that he would 
save the Act of Succession. It was onlv when he 
disappointed the former that Bolingbroke, a ruined 
political gamester, uttered, in his letter to Wyndham, 
that savage judgment on him, ^that he had a weak 
spirit and a wicked soul.^ And when he slunk out 
of office, his enemies rejoiced over his fall, and joined 
the Whigs in their second act of folly. The first was 
the prosecution of Sacheverel, the other was the im- 
peachment of Harley. They did not see that Harley was 
an accomplished dissembler, who had one object before 
him, that of being Prime Minister. He was satisfied 
with his success when he reached his dignity, and he 
enjoyed it for four years. People believed that he 
was a sphinx — a great mystery; but he was really a 
man with much tact, infinite good temper, no prin- 
ciples, a sincere belief in himself, and a total indif- 
ference as to the means by which he might rise to 
eminence. He would, I make no doubt, have pre- 
ferred remaining a Dissenter and a AVIiig; against 



44 ClIABLES 210 N TAG U, 

his will^ and in his own interest^ he became a Tory, 
and was thought to be a Jacobite. If Bolingbroke, 
instead of being a courtier, an intriguer, and a free- 
thinker, had been a country gentleman of our day, he 
would have wished his Leader to have been in heaven, 
or in some other place, at the great crisis of 17 14. 

The most noteworthy fact in the political history 
of that epoch which lies between the accession of Wil- 
liam and the death of Anne, was the public employ- 
ment of men who had no recommendation beside their 
capacity. Such men were, for example. Prior, Addi- 
son, Steele, Tickell. Swift himself might have been 
Secretary to the Embassy at Vienna, and this at a 
most critical period. The Bishop of Bristol nego- 
tiated the peace of Utrecht. The scene changed when 
Walpole came into power, and inaugurated a new sys- 
tem of government. This minister ruled the country 
party by pensions and peerages, by honours and hard 
cash, by the simplest, and, for a time, the cheapest 
expedients. He had learnt his lesson in Opposition ; 
and in those days, the Opposition was not only 
hungry, but desperate, and, for its personal ends, 
preternaturally acute. 

Through the epoch which I have spoken of, the 
public life of Halifax lasted. He was the first finance 
minister that England had. He understood the con- 
ditions of public credit, and he had, for his time, a 
clear comprehension of the machinery which is needed 
for mercantile prosperity. I cannot say that, had he 
lived long enough, he would have saved England from 



EARL OF HALIFAX. 45 

the wild frenzy wliicli eulminated in the South Sea 
Scheme. ^Vithin our own experience, a q^reater finan- 
cier tlian Montag^u was at the liead of affairs wlien 
Parliament sanctioned the mad speculations of the 
great railway buhble ; when projects were legalised, the 
completion of whicli would have required more tlian 
the annual earnings of capital and labour to effect 
them; when Capel Court renewed the memories of 
''Change Alley, and the Craggses and Aislabies were 
reproduced too numerously for reprobation and 
punishment. 

The commencement of responsible government was 
the commencement of the science of finance. But 
this science is yet only in its infancy. The problem 
is twofold, — how to combine efiiciency with economy 
in the public service; how to adjust public burdens 
so that taxation shall be equitable. But these are 
only the most obvious of those numerous economical 
questions, the solution of which is of pressing im- 
portance, which grow in urgency as they are delayed, 
and which have been delayed, only in deference to 
clamorous interests. 



SIR EOBEET WALPOLE, 

EARL OF ORFORD. 



SIE EOBEET WALPOLE, 

EARL OF ORFORD. 

The antiquarian who gives his attention to the 
beginnings of constitutional history in England, finds 
the germ of that theory of government which sur- 
rounds the monarch with ministerial advisers, in the 
l-jeremptory and despotic administration of Henry the 
Eighth. This prince, who more than any other Eng- 
lish king ruled by sheer force of will, appears to have 
been the autlior of a system which has ultimately 
destroyed the power which it was intended to as- 
sist, usui-ped the functions which it was intended to 
strengthen. As the Merovingian kings api^ointed 
their Mayors of the Palace, and the descendants of 
Charles the Great trusted to the Counts of Paris, 
only to find masters and successors in their ministers 
and political seiwants, so the House of Tudor in- 
vented the machinery which, professing to maintain 
all the forms of monarchical institutions, has made 
this country to all intents and purposes a republic, 
the chief magistrates of which are elected by the 
popular branch of the Legislature, and are controlled 
l>y an opposition which is only a little more informal 
than the organisation which it criticises, attacks, or 

£ 



50 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 

condemns. The circumstances which have developed 
the limited monarchy of the United Kingdom are 
wholly fortuitous^ if indeed that is accidental which 
has not only not been foreseen^ but which has ori- 
ginated by gradual progression from a system which 
was intended to counteract the very consequences 
which have ensued from it. 

The government of a country by a board of ad- 
ministrators^ who are in theory heads of official de- 
partments^ and whose councils and policy originate 
in a conclave which has no legal existence^ who are 
called into being by the approval of Parliament^ and 
who are extinguished by its disapproval^ is almost 
peculiar to ourselves. In almost every country but 
our own the will of the chief magistrate counts for 
something. In the most popular or democratic go- 
vernments it counts for a great deal. We have lately 
witnessed a singularly unseemly controversy^ carried 
on between the chief of the American Republic and 
the Houses of Parliament in the American Union. 
The legislative and executive functions have been in 
constant collision, and the civilised world has been 
amused or scandalised^ while the public policy of the 
great Commonwealth of North America has been 
checked by a deadlock. Between this political sys- 
tem and the Ca^sarism which identifies the will of the 
monarch with the life of the State^ there are numerous 
varieties of personal government more or less auto- 
cratic. But there are no institutions precisely like 
our own, in which the ministers of government are 



EARL OF OEFOIW, 



constituted or displaced by a simple and encrg-ctic 
machinery^ that by wliicli the popular Council of the 
Xation grants its confidence to an administration, or 
withdraws its countenance from it. It is a century 
and a-half since the Crown has put its veto on a 
measure sanctioned by both Houses; it is nearly as 
long a time since the Crown has pursued an inde- 
pendent policy, that is, has supported or resisted 
measures which have obtained a concurrent majority 
in the opinion of both Houses. The early princes of 
the Hanoverian House were willing enough to be 
despotic, and sometimes succeeded in cajoling one of 
the Estates into supporting their prejudices or con- 
victions, but they have never been able to take a 
wholly independent line of action by the aid of their 
ministers. 

This singular adjustment of political forces has 
been developed from a simple formula. The Crown 
is irresponsible, but its advisers are under a perpetual 
responsibility. In early times this responsibility was 
secured by the right of impeachment, which the Legis- 
lature has asserted for five hundred years. Later, the 
same result has been attained Ijy the milder method 
of a vote of no confidence, an act of political ostra- 
cism under which an administration is as effectually 
constrained to abdicate as Continental monarchs have 
been by revolutions. Nor could the most resolute 
prince resist. He is not indeed chargeable, according 
to the respectful language of our constitution, with 
the errors or crimes of his advisers. But until lie 

E % 



52 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 

appoints or accepts others, who possess the confidence 
denied to their predecessors, the whole mechanism of 
administration is arrested or suspended. These facts 
are indeed familiar enough to us all, but they repre- 
sent a political system which is not merely singular 
but unique. 

It is impossible to define in an unwritten or tradi- 
tional constitution, and nearly as impossible in a con- 
stitution which is precisely defined, what are the 
relative functions of legislative and executive forces. 
In this country we have given the fullest power to 
the latter, but have made those who wield the forces 
absolutely dependent on the former. Had no such 
agencies interposed between the ruler and the subject, 
the limitation of either^s rights would have been the 
material for a perpetual and ever- varied conflict. The 
struggle would have been provoked by the personal 
will, the abilities, the impulses, even by the physical 
constitution of the former, as these vary in different 
individuals, or in the same individual. Parliaments 
too, like monarchs, have their idiosyncrasies, and 
there would be in the struggle between these rivals, 
a perpetual ebb and flow of prerogative and liberty, 
of executive authority and legislative control. Such a 
political system did indeed characterise our parlia- 
mentary history for many a century. The Legislature 
was variably strong and weak from the days of the 
first Edwards to the Revolution, sometimes assuming 
great powers, as in the times of Richard the Second 
and Charles the First, sometimes sinking almost to 



EABL OF on FORD. 53 

the level which was reached by the French Parlia- 
ments of the ancient monarchy, as in the days of 
Henry the Eighth and Charles the Second. 

The theor}^ of ministerial responsibiUty, guaranteed 
as it was in very early days by the right of jxirlia- 
mentary impeachment^ was, like many analogous in- 
stitutions, of very slow growth. Familiar as the 
process is, it is really a remarkable political abstrac- 
tion, as abstruse as some of those metaphysical para- 
doxes which exercised the ingenuity of the schoolmen. 
It affirms the form of monarchical institutions, and, 
without making an election, confers the executive 
powers of the State on the elected head of a legis- 
lative republic. No publicist, I may venture to 
affirm, woidd have ever dreamed of developing so 
peculiar, and at first sight so contradictory and illo- 
gical a process of force and check, from any theory of 
government. And, for the same reason, no such sys- 
tem could have suddenly sprung up. It must have 
been produced slowly, though it may perhaps be 
imitated without difficulty by other political com- 
munities. Had it been fully developed at the epoch 
of the American War of Independence, it is prob- 
able that Washington and his associates would have 
adopted its provisions. The founders of the American 
republic had two difficulties before them of no com- 
mon magnitude. The first of these was how they 
could secure the municipal independence of the several 
-tates comprising the Union, and grant at the same 
time a respectable autonomy to the federal councils. 



54 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 

The second was the harmony between the executive 
and legislative functions of the president and these 
councils. So great was the former difficulty^ that 
much diplomacy and not a little deceit^ if indeed the 
latter can be distinguished from the former, was 
employed by Franklin in order to effect the union, 
a union which, as we all know, was bound by a very 
precarious tie. The latter is even now unsolved, 
though the solution would have been easier had the 
ministers of the President been absolutely responsible 
to Congress and the Senate, instead of being respon- 
sible to those powers for a crisis only, that is, at the 
moment of their appointment. 

One of the commonest errors into whicb superficial 
critics of political events fall, is that of interpreting 
past forces by the light of present experience. People 
talk and write of the administration of Edward the 
Third^s days, as though they were discussing the 
social phenomena of a time in which the forces of 
government had each its definition, place, and func- 
tion. But at that time, and for many a century 
afterwards, each, force in the social machine was 
seeking to secure itself and to assert further powers, 
and this at the expense of personal government, that 
is, by revolution. We speak of revolution with alarm. 
But, in fact, revolutions are matters of degree, vary- 
ing not in kind but in intensity, between the simple 
but organic changes which acquire the force of law 
and abiding precedent, and earthquakes which fre- 
quently level buildings only that they may be built 



^ 



EARL OF OR FORD. 



up again in the same form but with greater solidity. 
The English revolution of 1688 was to outward aj)- 
pearance a mere change of dynasty^ accompanied by 
a few constitutional guarantees, the force ol' which 
was for a long time imperfectly understood^ the spirit 
of which was for a longer time only imperfectly appre- 
ciated. But it was a real and OTcat advance. The 
French revolution of a century later shook the poli- 
tical world to its centre. It affected to wholly ignore 
the past, except in its allusions to republican Greece 
and Rome. It has left a few superficial marks on 
French society. It has effected an equality before the 
law. It has divided the estate of a deceased ancestor 
equally,, or almost equally^ among his children or 



descendants. But it has not given a single guarantee 
to human liberty^ has not warranted its assertions, has 
not justified itself. At the present moment^ France 
is reproducing the social system of Louis Quatorze, 
only in a coarser shape^ with all the extravagance, 
waste, licentiousness^ irritable vanity, aggressiveness, 
bounce, superficial orthodoxy, hard scepticism, heart- 
lessness, intellectual brilliancy, intellectual depravity, 
which characterised that epoch. It is not easy to 
say what humanity has gained by the French revo- 
lution. It would be a long story to recount wliat it 
has lost by that upheaval. 

The social history of this time is to l)e gatlicred 
from sources like Hervey^s Memoirs, Horace W ;il- 
pole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann, and similar mate- 
rials — the works of men who, having no motive to 



56 ^/7^ ROBERT WALPOLE, 



praise or blame^ are valuable authorities in proportion 
to their opportunities for learning, and capacity for 
interpreting the facts to which they witness. Simi- 
larly a composition of Hogarth^s gives us a clear 
conception of the outer life of London, such as those 
of the ^Election/ the ^ March to Finchley/ ^ Gin 
Alley/ and ^ Beer Lane/ How strange that the art 
of the painter has produced one Hogarth only, has 
never, except in this case, developed pictorial comedy! 

Between June ii, 1727, and October 25, 1760, the 
foremost personage in this country was a little fussy 
man, who talked incessantly and fluently, though 
with a strong foreign accent, was snappish beyond 
measure to those he liked the best or respected the 
most, was plentiful in coarse abuse on the smallest 
provocation, or no provocation at all, had a fairly 
strong memory of injuries, and none whatever of 
benefits or services. He is reported to have loved 
one person, his mother, the unhappy Sophia Dorothea, 
though the best proof that this feeling was not de- 
rived from his hatred to his father lay in the fact 
that immediately on his accession he set up his 
mother^s picture in his cabinet. He is reported to 
have respected one person, and that was his wife. 
He hated his eldest son with the greatest bitterness, 
much more bitterly than his father had hated him. 
It may be doubted whether he rejoiced more at his 
father^s death than he did at his son^^s. 

George the Second had a marvellous faculty for 
shedding copious tears on the shortest notice and the 



EARL OF ORFORD. 57 

most trivial occasions. AVhen his eldest daughter 
married the Prince of Orange, he gave her, says 
Hervey, a thousand kisses, a shower of tears, but not 
a single guinea. When Walpole pressed his Excise 
scheme in the House of Commons, and nearly ruined 
himself in the attempt, George used to blurt out, with 
flushed cheeks and gushing eyes, ^ He is a brave fel- 
low; he has more spirit than any man I know."^ 
He wept incessantly during the Quecn^s last illness, 
thousrh he was at the time arrans^innr" the iournev of 
that Madame AValmoden whom the heralds know 
as the Countess of Yarmouth. He wept still more 
abundantly when his minister retired from his coun- 
cils. But there was always a mixture of brutality in 
his tenderest acts and words. 

When Walpole^s administration was in the greatest 
peril, because it was believed that the King had 
perished in the storms of December 1736, the great 
minister spoke of the King as his ' sweet master,'' and 
was profoundly anxious for his safety. But the same 
minister two years before had said of George, that 
^ to talk to him of compassion, consideration for past 
services, charity, and bounty, was to make use of 
words which bore no meaning to him.^ His avarice 
was enormous. The beginnings of his quarrel with 
his worthless son were over money matters. He 
could not endure to increase Fredericks income out 
of his civil list to the amount which he had received 
himself. He loved his army more than anything 
else, and insisted that he should manage it himself. 



58 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 

But he kept important places in the service vacant 
for very niggardhness^ not because it would have cost 
him anything to fill them up_, but from sheer dislike 
to giving anything away. He crippled Walpole by 
refusing to allow him the means of corrupting the 
House of Commons through the Horse Guards. A 
generation or two later^ and this portion of the pre- 
rogative was conceded to the Ministry. 

He had^ it seems^ one conversational gift. He 
was able (and I presume it is easier for kings to do 
this than for subjects) to turn away any topic which 
displeased him. He also invented the cut direct^ 
for he had the trick of looking at the place in which 
his son stood as though no one were there. To his 
family he was a bore of the first water. He enter- 
tained the Queen with a minute description of his 
Hanoverian picnics with Madame Walmoden. When 
he was away^ he filled reams of paper with similar 
details, which were regularly posted to his wife. 
Caroline sat during these recitals sometimes yawning, 
sometimes smiling, always knotting. She regularly 
and as fully answered his letters. His daughters 
were less patient, and when he prosed over the old 
story of his courage, and fearlessness, and presence 
of mind, they pretended to be asleep. Lord Hervey 
affects to be shocked at their duplicity. The daughters 
would have been more undutiful still, had they not 
hated and feared their brother too heartily to resent 
anything from their father. 

Queen Caroline was her husband^s good genius. 



EARL OF OR FOR I). 



59 



Her fatlier-iu-law loathed lier, and invarial)ly spoke 
of her as a she-deviL She simply lived ibr the Kinq-. 
It is possible that she loved hiin ; but she certainly 
made the furtherance of his interests^ and the study 
of his caprices^ and even the satisfaction of his peculiar 
pleasures, the entire business of her existence. She 
either did not feel, or she perfectly dissifnulated any 
resentment at his conduct. She condescended with 
the strangest alacrity to the strangest compliances, 
not indeed passively, but actively, not with him 
alone, but in concert with Walpole for him. She 
guided him in everything, where guidance was pos- 
sible ; but always affected to defer to his opinion. It 
is possible that he was taken in by an affectation 
of profound and perpetual humility. It is said that 
she loved power. But she does not appear to have 
ever willingly exercised any direct influence in public 
affairs, and she certainly never wished her husband to 
prolong his Hanoverian visits. She was regent during 
the King's lengthiest absence, perhaps necessarily, but 
she knew well enough that her occupation of this office 
only embittered her son towards her. Nor was her 
office a sinecure during the crisis of Madame Walmo- 
den's fascinations. There was rioting in the West 
against the corn-laws; rioting in Spitalfields against 
the Irish immigrants; rioting in Scotland against 
civil authority, when the Edinburgh mob broke into the 
Tolbooth, and hanged Porteous in the Grass-market. 

The Queen was as little fastidious in her language 
as she was sensitive on topics about which (pieens 



6o SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 

are, we may suppose, like other women. She jested 
with Hervey, with Walpole^ with Stair^ with Kinski^ 
in the broadest and plainest fashion. She was always 
alert, sprightly, and keen. She was,, when she spoke 
of men and things^ the impersonation of good sense. 
^The triple alliance/ she said^ ^between Spain^ France, 
and Sardinia, puts me in mind of the South-Sea 
scheme, which the parties concerned in entered into^ 
not without knowing the cheats but hoping to make 
advantage of it^ everybody designing when he had 
made his fortune^ to be the first in scrambling out 
of it^ and each thinking himself wise enough to be 
able to leave his fellow-adventurers in the lurch.^ 
The parallel of a commercial bubble and a diplomatic 
alliance entered into for military purposes, is close 
and exact. History reproduces itself. The triple 
alliance of 1853, as far as two of the high contracting 
parties were concerned, was of a piece with that to 
which the Queen alluded when she compared this 
diplomatic intrigue to a vast commercial fraud. The 
third part of the parallel fails only, because it re- 
presents a minister instead of a monarch. 

It was part of the Queen'^s conjugal duty to hate 
her son. If she did not really hate him, her dissimu- 
lation was astonishing. Her daughter Caroline was 
at one with her mother. ^ No one would credit/ says 
Hervey, ^unless he heard, the names they called him, 
the character they gave him, the curses they lavished 
on him, and the fervour with which they prayed 
every day for his death." I presume that there never 



EARL OF ORFORD, 6i 



was any other mother who said of her son, that ^ he 
was the greatest ass^ the greatest liar, the greatest 
canaille, and the greatest beast in the world, and 
that she heartily wished lie was out of it.' The 
daughter had another reason, for when she dined 
with her brother, he insisted that she should sit on 
a stool, and be served with diminished state. It is, 
however, difficult to arrive at the reasons for this 
unnatural disgust. The bitterness and the provoca- 
tions seem more like the mad unreasoning rage which 
is sometimes entertained by monks and nuns against 
each other, when they are constrained to be per- 
petually together. 

The Queen sacrificed her health, and finally her 
life, to her husband. She had been sorely tried by 
her alarm for the King^s safety in the preceding 
winter, and had undergone fresh anxiety when Pul- 
teney, as leader of the opposition, had tried to get 
an increase of the Princess allowance. After strenuous 
efforts, the proposal was defeated by 230 votes to 
204. ^ The victory was supposed,'' said Walpole, ' to 
have cost a great deal of money. It really was 
settled,^ he continued, ^ by a bribe of some ^'400 or 
<^5oo, given to two men.'' Tliese circumstances ag- 
gravated the disease under which she suffered, and 
which she had concealed from every one but Lady 
Sundon. Something may be said, too, for the com- 
parative unskilfulness of the surgeons at that time. 
The secret was valuable, however, to the lady in wait- 
ing. So elated was this personage with the interest 



62 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 

which this confidence seemed to give her, that she 
actually proposed to Walpole that they should join 
hands^ and govern the nation between them. Wal- 
pole answered^ that he preferred the rule of the King 
and Queen^ but added that^ if she contrived to effect 
such an alliance with any other statesman^ he hoped 
that he might reckon on her countenance. The Queen 
died^ and Pope^ that ' mens curva in corpore curvo,^ 
as Atterbury described him^ continued^ as might have 
been anticipated^ to lampoon her in her grave, in an 
epigram which has no parallel for coarse spite. She 
cared little for lampoons in her life. She had the 
good sense to know that monarchs are always calum- 
niated, and that half the wit and all the malignity 
of a calumny are neutralised by indifference. The 
King"'s sorrow for his wife^s death gave him a popu- 
larity which he never enjoyed before. As long as 
he could^ too^ he followed her dying advice. She 
summoned Walpole to her deathbed^ and said^ ^I 
have nothing to tell you, but to recommend the King, 
my children,, and the kingdom to your care.^ She 
loved one of her sons as much as she hated the other. 
That son was William, whose reputation was made 
at Culloden, and lost at Closterseven. 

Aristotle tells a droll story of a family in Greece, 
in which a son was dragging his father to the door 
of their house, and was about to turn him out, when 
the father remonstrated, and said, * Up to the door 
it is fair enough, for I dragged my father to this 
point, and then stopped;'' and adds that the apology 



EARL OF ORFORD. 63 

for the scandal was to be found in the fact tliat sucli 
acts of violence were characteristic of the family. A 
similar explanation was given in the last century of 
the quarrels between father and son in the Hano- 
verian dynasty. George the First and his son were 
estranged ; George the Second and his son abandoned 
all decency in their quarrel. It is not clear that a 
similar feud arose in the next family^ but it is certain 
that the son gave occasion enough for such a broil. 
Tlie explanation is more natural when one reilects 
on the fact that the causes of difference between 
George the Second and the Prince were so utterly 
frivolous. The Prince wanted a larger allowance, 
and was annoyed at not being made regent in his 
father^s absence ; and committed his crowning offence 
by bringing the Princess, just before his eldest 
daughter's birth, to London against the King^s ex- 
press direction. A similarly trivial circumstance 
precipitated matters between George the First and 
his son. The King had appointed the Duke of New- 
castle godfiither to his grandson, the unlucky Frederic, 
and Prince George insulted the Duke after the cere- 
mony was over. 

It is manifest that Frederic, though his character 
has generally been drawn ])Y those who sided with 
the King, was profuse, vain, arrogant, and uncertain. 
He might have inherited all these vices but the first 
from his father. The enmity which sprung up be- 
tween them might have made him headstrong and 
obstinate. But it is not necessary to derive such 



64 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 

traits from hereditary tendencies. The youth of 
Edward the Second and of Henry the Fifth were 
equally marked by wilfulness and disobedience. 

I have abeady stated that a century ago the 
English monarchs had many opportunities for making 
their will felt in the conduct of public affairs. When 
kings are absolute, the eldest son is but the principal 
subject, and cannot intrigue^ except cautiously and 
secretly. But when the monarch'^s will is controlled by 
constitutional forms — but especially when he still exer- 
cises a real influence in the choice of his ministers — 
the opposition naturally seeks its head in the Crown 
Prince. The heir of the Prussian monarchy has al- 
ways sided with the liberal party^ the King with the 
despotic. Thus Frederic associated himself with the 
Patriots, his grandson with Fox^s adherents. Had 
Frederic lived to succeed his father^ he would as 
assuredly have allied himself with the Whigs of 
Walpole^s school as his son accepted the services of 
Pelham^ and as his grandson,, when he came to the 
regency, employed Castlereagh and Sidmouth. Deeply 
as the Prince of Wales hated Walpole^ passionately 
as he longed for his downfall eagerly as he furthered 
his impeachment in 1732^ he would, I feel persuaded, 
have been reconciled to him by the force of cir- 
cumstances in the spring of 1737^ had George the 
Second perished in the storm of the previous De- 
cember. But though the fact that the position of 
the Prince of Wales naturally made him the rallying- 
point of the opposition, it is not marvellous that he 



EARL OF ORFORD. 65 

was suspected; and, consider! ng* the temper of the 
King", finally hated by his lather. 

In these days, the strength of the House of Lords 
consisted in the control which its members exercised 
over the nomination borouMis. It was to his enormous 
l^atronage in these representative shams that the 
silly and perfidious Duke of Newcastle owed his pro- 
longed power. It is almost unnecessary to say, that 
the political influence of an hereditary chamber must, 
under a popular and responsible Government, be secured 
by indirect means. AVhen Walpole, then Earl of 
Orford, met his ancient rival, Pulteney, the new Earl 
of Bath, on the floor of the House of Lords, he said, 
' Here we are, my lord, the two most insignificant 
fellows in the kingdom.'' But a century ago, such 
words could not have been used, even in jest, of 
Newcastle, Devonshire, and Marlborough. 

The House of Commons was, as far as most of 
the boroughs were concerned, filled with nominees. 
The Scotch members from both boroughs and counties 
were of the same character, though, strangely enough, 
Scotland sometimes cast a vote in favour of public 
liberty. When in 1718, Lord Stanhope, to his great 
iionour, proposed the repeal of the Occasional Con- 
formity Act, and was opposed by the Tories, and 
nearly the whole bench of Bishops, carrying his 
measure by eighty-six votes to sixty-eight, and when 
the measure was passed in the Lower House, by 24 3 
votes to 202, it is noteworthy that thirty-four Scotch 
members out of thirty-seven voted for the repeal. 

r 



66 SIJR ROBERT WALPOLE, 

With such people from such boroughs^ popular 
representation would have been a total farce_, but for 
the county electors. The strength of the nation^ the 
guarantees of civil liberty^ lay in the freeholders and 
in a few large towns. In those days^ there were yeo- 
men tilling their own lands with a conscious and 
sturdy independence. The latifundia of our time had 
hardly begun to exist, and the great proprietors were 
obliged to defer to the wishes and political opinions 
of these resolute freeholders, if they were at all 
ambitious of representing counties in Parliament. 
Nor can it be doubted that the influence of the county 
electors was indirectly felt by the proprietors of the 
nomination boroughs. A century and a half ago, 
even a Duke of Newcastle could not have ventured 
on angrily inquiring whether he had not a right 
to do what he would with his own^ even though, the 
Duke were such a man as he was of whom Hervey 
said ; that ^ he and Chancellor King both spoke plen- 
tifully^ and both equally unintelligibly — the latter 
from having lost his understandings the former from 
never having had any."* How rapid has been, even in 
recent days^ the elimination of these freeholders^ is 
seen in the fact^ that the number of such electors 
in the county of Berkshire was greater before the 
Act of 1832 than that of all the electors prior to 
the reform of 1867. 

It was^ I repeat^ in the counties and some large 
boroughs that political feeling was kept alive. It 
was in these that the most vehement contests of 



EAUL OF ORFOIW. 67 

parties were witnessed. Tlie impoverishment of many 
an ancient family_, the embarrassment of more^ can 
be traced back to these conflicts. The Oxfordsliire 
election of 1754 was famous for generations. So was 
that of Appleby^ between Lowther and Lord Thanet^ 
for it cost .^55;OOo. In the year before AValpole^s 
fell there was a similar contest for Westminster, 
where every effort was made to return candidates 
unfavourable to the ministry. The effort was suc- 
cessful. ^AVe should have carried the Westminster 
election/ said Lord Chesterfield;, ' if we had set up 
two broomsticks.^ ^ So I see/ said Lord Lovel. The 
poll was carried on till the electors were exhausted, 
or one of the candidates retired. Bribery, notwith- 
standing the Act of 1729^ flourished and struck deep 
root. 

Petitions and disputed returns were investigated 
by a committee of the whole House. It is almost 
unnecessary to say, that in that age, when factions 
strove bitterly for the mastery, fairness was the last 
thing thought of. The most outrageous decisions 
were arrived at. The scandal of these proceedings 
A'as monstrous. In one case, the House voted that 
tV.rty was more than ninety. In another, they cut 
"if the votes of seven towns and some thousands of 
/oters. The decision as to whether the electoral fran- 
chise was conferred on the corporation, the freemen, 
or the scot-aiid-lot voters, was affirmed or rescinded 
on party grounds. Hervey, in the most natural way, 
complains of this injustice, and asserts that the House 

F 2 



68 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 

thought nothing of robbing a man of his seat^ after 
he had paid several thousand pounds to gain it ; and 
moralizes^ as we might moralize from other and later 
instances^ ^that when shame is divided among five 
hundred men^ the portion of each individual is so 
small^ that it hurts their pride as little as it dis- 
concerts their countenances/ Those advocates of that 
privilege of Parliament which consists in controlling 
elections^ examining disputed returns, and deciding 
on the qualification of candidates, have probably for- 
gotten the scandals which preceded the passing of 
Grenville^s Act. Perhaps they do not even recollect 
how uncertain were the principles which guided the 
smaller committees of our own day. 

Walpole fell in consequence of an adverse vote 
given by one of these election committees in 1742; 
the body of Patroclus, round which the Achseans and 
Trojans waged battle, being the borough of Chippen- 
ham. To any feeling besides the pedantic attachment 
to precedent, nothing could be more ludicrous than 
the fact that a ministry succumbed to a verdict on 
a disputed claim to a seat in the House ; a verdict — 
the word had ceased to have any etymological mean- 
ing — which should have been determined by justice 
and not by party passion. 

Another strange rule which the House of Commons 
at that time maintained with the greatest severity, 
was that of enforcing secrecy about its proceedings. 
The regulation was once a guarantee of freedom of 
speech against regal despotism. It was well enough 



KAllL OF on FOR D. f)9 

in the days of the five members^ wlieii kind's turned 
eavesdroj^pers by themselves or by deputy ; but it was 
a mere bhnd to corruption at a time when Parliament 
was all-poweriul. In consequence^ the kings of the 
limited monarchy learned that coercion, except when 
the members held place or pension^ was impracticable 
or clumsy, and Walpole, following the precedent of 
Louis the Fourteenth in dealing wnth Charles the 
Second^s long parliament, adopted bribery in place of 
intimidation. He saw^ that force is not so powerful 
as persuasion, just as we have at last understood, 
though slowly and imperfectly, that the real remedy 
for treason is to make it ridiculous, the real remedy 
for disaffection is to make a people well affected. 

Those burgesses and knights of the shire who 
gathered under the roof of old St. Stephen^s^ clad 
in the costume which the Court has crystallized up 
to our time, bewigged, and girt with swords, carried 
on the strife of selfish faction under the guise of par- 
liamentary forms. One of two faculties was needed 
for any man who aspired to be a party leader. He 
must be skilful w^ith his weapon, or quick with his 
tongue. At no time, I believe, has wit been more 
keen, repartee more smart. There was no serious- 
ness, no earnest conviction abroad, but infinite clever- 
ness. The best poet, almost the only poet, was Pope, 
and he elaborated social satire more exquisitely than 
any writer before or since. But there is not a germ 
of conscientiousness in all his poetry. The letters, 
the memoirs, the essays of the time, si)arkle witli 



Sm ROBERT WALPOLE, 



humour^ are strewn witli felicitous retorts ; but they 
contain no beliefs. The latest and the greatest of 
these wits was Wilkes, whose pungent and lively 
sallies are even yet remembered. 

At the commencement of George the Seeond^s reign 
there w^ere four parties in the House of Commons. 
There were a few acknowledged Jacobites^ of whom 
the leader was Shippen. These men were on the 
whole dispirited and indifferent. There were the 
Hanover Tories^, the friends of the new settlement^ 
but still more the allies of the clerical party. Sir 
Thomas Hanmer might be said to lead them. There 
were Whigs out of place^ whose chief was Pulteney^ 
and who called themselves patriots ; and Whigs in 
place, who were called courtiers^ and who were under 
the guidance of Walpole. 

Robert Walpole was the second son of a Norfolk 
squire, who sat for King'^s Lynn up to the beginning 
of the eighteenth century, and was a steady Whig. 
The old man, said his grandson Horace, left among 
his memoranda an account of his expenses in London 
during a session of three months and ten days. They 
amounted to £6^ ys, ^d,, a sum, says the virtuoso, 
which w^e should think nothing of giving for a fan 
or a toy. Among the items of this expenditure is 
^ five shillings for Bob.'' 

This ' Bob'' was the Minister. The policy of Eliza- 
beth was aided for nearly forty years by William 
Cecil, but the Queen was rather counselled than guided 
by her astute secretary. The younger Pitt ruled for 



EARL OF ORFORD, 



nearly twenty years ; Lord Livorj^ool for lli'toon. ^^\\\ 
the reigns of Prime Ministers since the llevolution 
have, on the average, been shorter than those of 
Popes. Walpole'^s was the longest, for he governed 
the three kingdoms uninterruptedly for twenty-onr 
years. 

He was born on August 26, 1676. Originally 
intended for the Church, as being the second son, 
he was sent, as his younger bn^ther Horace was, to 
Eton, and King^s College, Camln-idge. The death 
of his elder brother made him heir to an estate of 
^2,oco a-year, and he was returned to Parliament 
in 1700 for Castle Rising, and soon after for the 
borough which his father represented, King^s Lynn, 
and for which he sat till he took his peerage. He 
was soon employed, for he was appointed Secretary 
at War in the room of St. John in I70(S, and was 
made Treasurer of the Navy in 1710, when he acted 
as manager of SacheverelFs impeachment. On Har- 
ley^s accession to power he \vas expelled the House 
on a charge of corruption, and imprisoned in the 
Tower for seven months. On the accession of George 
lie w^as made Paymaster, and soon afterwards First 
Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer. Two years later he was turned out of odicc 
by Sunderland, but was again made Paymaster in 
1720. In the next year Sunderland resigned, and 
Walpole again became Prime Minister. He held 
office till Feb. 1742, when he resigned and was raised 
to the peerage. He still, however, thougli ofiicially 



SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 



in retirement^ advised the King^ and thwarted his 
enemies. He died three years after his resignation, 
on March 1 8, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. 

The management of public affairs during the six 
years of George the First^s reign^, in which Walpole 
was Prime Minister, was easy. Fortunately for him, 
the South Sea bubble had been blown during Sunder- 
land^s administration. Walpole had grown rich by 
judicious speculation, and by more judicious realization 
during the mania, for he sold his stock at c5^i,ooo 
the share. He now assumed office with the object of 
extricating the nation from the embarrassments into 
w^hich it had fallen in consequence of the wild schemes 
upon which so many had embarked and wrecked their 
fortunes. Simultaneously with Walpole''s accession 
to power Atterbury^s plot had been detected and 
crushed, the bishops being foremost in the attack on 
their restless and haughty brother. The King, to 
be sure, w^as rapacious and selfish, accustomed to look 
on England as an appanage to Hanover, and as fond 
of his electoral dominions as he hated his wife and 
son. Walpole retained his power by small com- 
pliances, and of course supported the King against the 
Prince. His political fortunes seemed to be ruined 
by George the First^s death. That King^s successor 
had ransacked a very copious vocabulary of abuse, in 
order to stigmatise the minister and his associates. 
Rogue and rascal, scoundrel and fool, were his com- 
monest utterances when Robert Walpole^s name was 
mentioned. Similarly, he called Horace Walpole a 



EARL OF ORFORD. 



dirty biilfoon^ Xewcastle an inipertinent fool, — tlio 
most just^ by the way^ of tliese contumelious clescrij)- 
tions, — and Townsend, Walpolc's brother-in-law, a 
choleric blockhead, with nearly equal justice. Nor 
was Walpole more courteous. He had constantly 
spoken contemptuously of the Prince, and had nick- 
named Caroline in a way which a less prudent and 
more sensitive woman would have held unpardonable, 
and would never have pardoned. 

Walpole bowed meekly to the coming storm. The 
King sent for Sir Spencer Compton, and everybody 
hastened to pay his court to the new favourite. Sir 
Spencer, with a simplicity which seems incredible, 
requested Walj)ole to write the King^s speech, and the 
ex-minister agreed to do so with the utmost humility 
and complaisance. It is superfluous to say that he 
composed it with the greatest care ; and that he made 
no secret of his authorship. It was impossible that 
such a farce could be carried out. The King, taking 
counsel with his wife in reality, though affecting, as 
he always did, to act on his own judgment, said 
that the writer of the speech must be the minister ; 
and the Queen sent a message to Walpole, informini,^ 
him, in her characteristic way, that his coarse allusion 
to her personal appearance had been remembered, to 
be forgiven. After AValpole^s disgrace. Sir Spencer 
Compton was allowed to succeed him, under the name 
of Lord Wilmington. 

At first, Walpole was associated with his brother- 
in-law, Townsend. But they soon disagreed, and the 



74 SIB ROBERT WALFOLE, 

rupture was total after the death of Walpole^s sister^ 
Townsencrs wife. ^As long/ said the minister^ ^as 
the firm was Townsend and Walpole all went well, but 
as soon as it came to be Walpole and Townsend all 
went ill/ Lord Hervey gives another reason for the 
diflerence. Before Walpole betook himself to the 
adornment of Houghton, Raynham was the hand- 
somest seat in Norfolk, then the richest county in 
England. Townsend^s vanity was deeply w^ounded 
when the splendour of his house was eclipsed by that 
of his brother-in-law. To be sure, Hervey had no 
liking for him^ describing him^ in a manner which 
reminds us of Swift^ ^ as more tenacious of his opinion 
than of his word, for the one he never gave up^ the 
other he seldom kept ; as blunt without being severe^ 
and false without being artful.'^ He further adds 
(and here we may recognise a comment of Walpole), 
*^that he affected great strokes in politics, which a 
wise minister should be incapable of concerting with- 
out tlie utmost necessity.^ 

After Townsend^s dismissal, Walpole reigned alone, 
if, indeed, he could be said to exercise sole functions 
w^hile Newcastle was tied to him. Long before he. 
was betrayed by this person, of whom he justly said 
that his name was perfidy, he knew how dangerous 
was the association. But Newcastle was the largest 
proprietor of rotten boroughs in the kingdom, and, 
fool and knave as he was, he had wit enough to 
guess at his own importance, and knavery enough 
to make his market. Walpolc's chief business lay 



EAllL OF ORFOIU), 73 



in managing' the King, tlie Queen, llie Chuivli, tlie 
House of Commons, and perhaps the people. 

I have ah-eady said, that before his aecession George 
hated Walpole. But there are hatreds and hatreds, 
equal in fervency while they last, l)ut dillerent in 
duration. The King hated AVal])ole because he had 
served his fiither well. But one George was gone, 
and another George was in possession. Then came 
before the man in possession the clear vision of 
Walpole^s consummate usefulness. The vision was 
made clearer by the sagacious hints of the Queen. 
It became clear as noonday when "Walpole contrived 
to add c^i 15,000 to the civil list; for there was 
one thing which the King loved more than Hanover, 
and Queen, and cliildren_, and Lady Suffolk, and 
Madame D^Elitz, the mistress to three generations of 
the House of Hanover, and sister to Lady Chester- 
field, and the Walmoden — and that was money. 
Besides, Walpole was sincerely determined to support 
the Hanoverian succession. He constantly insisted 
to George that the final settlement of his House on 
the throne would be fought out in England. It was 
clear that a man who w\as so prescient, would be also 
most capaljle of meeting the mischief whenever it 
should come. Hence he was able to check one 
of the King^s ruling passions, a longing to engager 
in war; for George was certainly brave, though given 
to gasconade, and would have greedily entered into 
a succession of campaigns, if he could only chastise 
the King of Prussia, his brother-in-law, wliom he 



SIB ROBERT WALPOLE, 



hated with one of those enduring hatreds which I 
have referred to. And Walpole was in the right. 
Three years and a half after his fall^ six months after 
his death^ came the march to Derby,, and the packing 
np of the property at Hampton and St. James^s^ and 
the peril of the Protestant succession — a peril which 
it seems was met by the facts^ that the young Pre- 
tender was ill-advised or dishonest enough to proclaim 
dubiously about keeping faith with the public cre- 
ditor, and was scrupulous enough to persevere in a 
religion which the English nation hated and feared. 
The House of Stuart is the last royal stock which 
has ever allowed its religious convictions to be a bar 
to preferment. In these days, ruling families are 
always ready with an ^eirenicon/ are conveniently 
versatile, whenever political exigencies summon them 
to embrace an alternative of creeds. 

The Queen was predisposed in favour of the minis- 
ter. She knew his value to herself and her interests ; 
and, had he been even more rough and coarse, she 
perpetually avowed that she was not nice. ' She was,^ 
said Walpole, ^main good at pumping; preferred 
to know everything, even though the knowledge 
shocked and pained her ; was ready to enter into any 
scheme which seemed expedient, even though the 
furtherance of the scheme constrained her to abandon 
all self-respect."^ But the chief agent between Walpole 
and the Queen was Lord Hervey, who filled an office 
in the household during that part of George the 
Second^s reign in which Walpole was minister. 



EARL OF OR FORD. 77 

Hervey, then eldest sou of the Earl ot'Brist(^l, was a 
mau of considerable accomplishments^ of great acuti^ 
nesSj and ready wit. ]Most people know of him by 
Pope^s bitter lines^ in which ho is caricatured under 
the name of Sporus. They had been friends, and luid 
quarrelled. Pope belonged^ as far as his nature 
allowed him to entertain political feeliu<T^s, to the 
Princess party_, as he had belonged to Atterbury^s, 
to the alliance of which Shippen aud Wyndham and 
Pulteney and Barnard were the heads. Hervey had 
a personal quarrel with the Prince, and was therefore 
willing enough to exasperate the enmity between the 
King and his heir ; between the royal family and 
their prospective tyrant. His singularly weak con- 
stitution constrained him to live the life of an an- 
chorite, in days when men habitually drank to excess. 
It made him popular with the ladies of the house- 
hold, in whose company he w^as sober as well as 
agreeable. His beverage was tea, which Lord Bristol 
said poisoned him. At last, he became almost ne- 
cessary to the Queen, who could hardly bear the loss 
of his amusing company for a day, and to the Princess 
Caroline, who was believed to entertain even tenderer 
feelings towards him. He played his part, that of 
alternate trifling and seriousness, with great skill, 
and was as useful to Walpole as he was a^^reeable 
to his mistress. As a narrator of Court gossip he 
is without a rival. His memoirs are a series of 
cabinet pictures, drawn, as he admits, in grotesque, 
and coloured more hii^hly than the facts would seem 
to less interested parties. 



;sni ROBERT WALPOLE, 



How strange the scene appears to us ! The Queen 
is dressings attended by Lady Suffolk or Lady Sundon; 
the Princess Caroline putting in a word now and 
then ; and the Princess Emily pouting by the fire. 
Hervey^ pallid and painted^ is relating gossip^ or dis- 
cussing some fresh affront of the Prince^ or com- 
menting on the tactics of the Patriots^ or on the King^s 
intrigues^ and being bidden by the Queen not to call 
too much attention to his reputation as an esprit 
fort, but to speak low^ because from the ante-chamber 
and through the half-closed door come the voices 
of the royal chaplains reading the daily service. One 
of these chaplains, less courtly than the rest^ stopped 
when the door was too nearly closed ; and on being 
asked why he did not go on^ answered that he would 
not whistle the word of God through a keyhole. 
How inexpressibly soothing^ to use the phrase of a 
distinguished divine of our day^ must have been the 
service of the Establishment in those times; or rather 
what a hideous farce was the whole business^ and 
how little need we wonder that such a social system 
developed monsters such as Stone and Blackburn, 
and later on, Cornwallis and Tomline, were. 

It is generally understood that Walpole managed 
the House of Commons by bribery ; that the secret 
service-money was thus employed : and that this 
minister was the father of that corruption which was 
reported to have disgraced the House during the 
first half of the last century. I suspect that these 
influences have been exaggerated. It is a stock story 



EARL OF ORFOllD. 7q 

that AValpole said he knew every mane's price. It 
might have been gxnierally triie^ but the foundation 
of this apophthegm is^ in all likelihood^ a recorded 
saying of his about certain members of the Oppo- 
sition. But Walpole knew well enongli that he 
could not have bought Shippen^ or Wyndham, or 
PulteneV; or any among the tribe of their followers. 
There were venal members then^ as^ in other forms^ 
there are venal members now. 

The fact is^ there were a host of places in the civil 
list, which were given away for political support^ 
and resumed for political apostacy^ or even the sus- 
picion of apostacy. Before the Place Bill of 1743, the 
House swarmed with pensioners. Every commission 
in the army or navy was conditional^ and the holder 
of it might be turned adrift at the King^s pleasure. 
The great Pitt, when a cornet in the Guards^ was 
broken for ridiculing the King^s negotiations about 
the Prince''s marriage. Lord Pembroke paid j^i 0^000 
for a troop in the Guards^ and was as summarily 
deprived of it without compensation. Social position^ 
interest^ and fear^ kept the House docile ; just as in 
our own days the expenditure of an election has been 
used as a threat against malcontents and remon- 
strants. In the later years of his administration, 
AValpole complained to Hcrvey that the King 
weakened his y^^wer by keeping army nominations 
exclusively in his own hands^ and tliereui)on by 
making the army independent of the minister. ^ How 
many people there are/ he said (in the crisis of 



So SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 

Pulteney's motion for increasing* the Princess allow- 
ance) ^whom I could bind to me by getting things 
done in the army^ you may imagine/ But the King 
was obstinate on this pointy though by doing as he 
did^ he disobliged the very men whom it was highly 
important to conciliate^ ultimately led the way to 
Walpole'^s fall^ and helped to create the danger in 
which his crown was placed by the events of 1745. 

In those days the clergy had great power^ especially 
in the county elections. Since the fall of Atterbury, 
the Government had taken the utmost care to prevent 
any see from being filled by any disaffected person. 
But capacity might induce independence. Hence, 
with the exception of Butler^ there is hardly a single 
prelate during this period of ecclesiastical history 
who was distinguished either for ability^ learnings 
or piety ; though there were many who scandalized 
even that age. But these prelates were employed,, 
and as it seems successfully^ by Walpole^ in keeping 
the country clergy in good temper. To maintain this 
good temper^ it was of course necessary that no con- 
cessions should be made to religious liberty^ or even 
to justice. With such an understanding, Walpole 
opposed the repeal of the Occasional Conformity Act, 
and contrived to baffle all attempts to repeal the Test 
and Corporation Acts. 

The Protestant Dissenters had been firm friends to 
the Hanoverian succession. The most intelligent 
among them declined the insidious Indulgence of 
James the Second, and after his abdication remained 



EARL OF OEFORD, 8i 

staunch to the princijiles of the Revolution. The 
laws enforced against them after the Restoration were 
abrogated or suilbred to sleep when the era of respon- 
sible government began. Once, and once only, was 
there a reaction, when the Tories of Queen Anne^s 
later years contrived in 1711 to pass the stringent 
Act to which I have several times alluded, an Act 
which was repealed after seven years^ existence. In 
course of time, the Dissenters claimed the repeal of 
the Test and Corporation Acts. But again Walpole 
could not venture on gratifying them. He induced 
Hoadley to mediate between them and him. The 
conference between this prelate, who seems to have 
exacted his succession to the see of Winchester as the 
price of his good offices, was managed by King and 
Newcastle on the part of Government, and by a Com- 
mittee of London Dissenters on behalf of the Non- 
conformists. Ultimately the Dissenters gave way. 
The time was not, or did not seem, ripe for this 
concession to justice and toleration. The force of 
the claim was weakened by its failure in 1730, and 
it took nearly a century to achieve it in the long 
run. Walpole^s policy in dealing with the clergy 
w^as a very simple rule; '^whoever,'' he said, ^ would 
govern any body of men must appear to be in their 
interest.' The precedent has been followed in our 
own experience. 

If the English prelates were good for little, the 
Irish were good for nothing. The impudent profli- 
gacy of Primate Stone, for which we must ransack 

G 



82 SIB IWBEET WALPOLB, 

the annals of the French Regency to find historical 
parallels^ is even yet remembered in Ireland. But 
this creature had a sort of conscience. Lord Pem- 
broke, it is reported, used to blaspheme so constantly 
and so violently at tennis, that Stone said it was 
as much as his character was worth to continue 
playing with him. Swift criticised the Irish appoint- 
ments in his customary vein. ^ The English Govern- 
ment,^ he said, ^ meant to appoint good bishops^ but 
these people after nomination were invariably robbed 
by footpads on leaving London,, and these fellows, 
not content with rifling their pockets and luggage, 
stole their clothes and patents as well, and posted 
to Ireland in their stead.'' 

During the last twenty years of the seventeenth 
century and the first forty of the eighteenth, England 
grew rapidly in material wealth. The value of land 
rose enormously. Great improvements were made in 
agriculture by the introduction of winter roots and 
artificial grasses. Farmers began to understand the 
rotation of crops. As a consequence, population in- 
creased largely. In 1 700, the inhabitants of England 
and Wales were below five millions, in 1 750, there is 
reason to believe that they had reached nearly double 
that number. This fact explains the rapid increase 
in the rentals of the aristocracy. Notwithstanding 
this growth, England exported large quantities of 
corn, wheat being so cheap during the first half 
of the eighteenth century, as to bring about the 
impression in the mind of so acute an observer as 



EABL OF OEFORD. 



Adam Smitli, that silver had materially risen in 
value. But the faet is, the era was one of general 
prosperity. Added to this progress at home, was 
that of the plantations in the tropical and semi- 
tropical colonies. ^lischievous as the process of 
cultivation was in them, and foolish as the colonial 
policy was, the product was so abundant as to far more 
than compensate for these social and economical errors. 
Besides, the wealth of foreign and colonial trade 
was added to the home prosperity of agriculture and 
manufacture. Of course the planter and the nabob 
were the most conspicuous among those wealthy 
upstarts, who were satirised at the time. The most 
obvious and natural use which they found for their 
money was in gorgeous equipages, in the j^urchase 
of parliamentary next j)resentations, or of political 
advowsons, and in the employment of these means 
for the end of obtaining hereditary place and rank 
in the great council of the nation. 

It does not seem, however, that the prosperity 
of the country was distributed as effectually as it 
was produced. The rich were luxurious and extrava- 
gant, and they were emulated by their inferiors in 
wealth. There was no police whatever, and the 
country, the suburbs, even London, swarmed with 
footpads and highwaymen. There is no great amount 
of romance in the Ijcggars^ opera. Men were trained 
to the profession by adepts, who never let go the end 
of the rope which they gave their pupils. Fielding^s 
grim history of Jonathan Wild the great is no gross 

G 2 



84 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 

exag'g'cration. But there was an aristocracy of birth 
and wealth. Aristocracies are always mercilessly 
cruel. The only schools they kept were the gaols^ 
their only discipline was transportation and the halter. 
Death was inflicted for almost every oflfence. Under 
an aristocracy^ whether it be of nobles or planters^ 
property is the most sacred,, human life the vilest 
things and in the Georgian Era^ men and women 
were hanged in squads. The only terror which the 
leo^islature thouo^ht would be effectual under this 
sanguinary code^ was that of shortening the time 
between sentence and execution. Writing to his 
friend from his modern Gothic villa of Strawberry 
Hill^ Horace Walpole says : ^ Seventeen were hanged 
this morning. One is forced to travel^ even at noon^ 
as if one were going to battle.^ These laws in favour 
of property and caste had a very tenacious vitality. 
As a young child^ I remember being taken to see 
the grave — how fresh I cannot recollect — of a man 
who had been hanged at Winchester for stealing fish 
out of a stew. This social discipline has passed away 
for a generation and a half. But it would be a folly 
to conclude that its effect has been effaced^ or to 
imagine that the brutality of the law has not pro- 
duced lasting results on the nature of the people. 

Walpole has been designated^ and with justice^ as 
emphatically a peace minister. He held ^that the 
most pernicious circumstances in which this country 
can bc; are those of war^ as we must be great losers 
while the war lasts^ and cannot be great gainers 



EAEL OF ORFORD. 85 

when it ends/ He kept George the Second at peace, 
as well as he could^ by insisting on it that the safety 
of his dynasty lay in avoiding foreign embroilments. 
He strove in vain against the war which broke out 
in 1739, when tlie South Sea merchants, or^ to be 
more correct^ smugglers^ in violation of the Assiento 
contract, goaded the nation into resisting the right 
of search which that treaty involved, and roused 
them to madness by the story of Jenkins^ ears; 
Jenkins, the Don Pacifico of the eighteenth century. 
So passionately eager were the mercantile classes for 
war^ that when it was proclaimed on October 19, 
1739, the Stocks rose. When the bells were rung 
in joy at the war, Walpole cried^ ^ You ring the bells 
now, you will soon be wringing your hands.^ He 
had work to do in checking those influential people, 
who, as Lord Grantham did, with earnest patriotism 
and bad grammar, continually shouted out, ^I hate 
the French, and I hope as we shall beat the French."* 
That AValpole had a rational dislike for war, be- 
cause he believed that it could always be avoided, 
and that its contingent advantages could never com- 
pensate for a tithe of the evils which it inevitably 
induces, is plain. He knew that a ministry which 
undertakes such a responsibility, however jiopular it 
is at first, is sooner or later unpopular; sooner, if the 
\var policy be undertaken by error of judgment ; later, 
even if the war policy be justified by the vulg-ar arts 
of demagogism. He was too sensible and honest a 
financier to carry on wars, as the elder Pitt almost 



86 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 

exclusively did, by loans; and he knew therefore that 
it was no easy matter to find current funds. But 
he had a personal reason for his peace policy. He 
loved power^ and he was strongly convinced that 
if he were forced or cajoled into war_, he would in- 
evitably be supplanted by one of those cheap heroes 
whom chance always thrusts to the front^, and ig- 
norance as regularly invests with every capacity and 
every virtue. 

I do not intend to disparage Walpole'^s adminis- 
trative ability^ when I say that the country prospered 
independently of any financial policy which he 
adopted or carried out. This is a matter of easy 
illustration. In the last year of the seventeenth 
century Liverpool was a small town. A quarter of 
a century^ and it was the third port in the kingdom^ 
ranking after London and Bristol. In the same 
period the population of Manchester doubled ; a 
similar growth took place in Birmingham. The 
Plantations in America and the Antilles flourished 
exceedingly. Walpole let matters take their course^ 
for he understood that the highest merit of a minister 
consists in his doing no mischief. 

But Walpole'^s praise lies in the fact^ that^ with 
this evident growth of material prosperity^ he steadily 
set his face against gambling with it. He resolved^, 
as far as lay in his power^ to keep the peace of 
Europe; and he was seconded in his efforts by Car- 
dinal Fleury. He contrived to smooth away the 
difficulties which arose in 1727; and on January 13^ 



EARL OF ORFOBD. 87 

1730^ negotiated the treaty of Seville, the benefits 
of which lasted throug-h ten years of peace, and under 
which he reduced the army to five thousand men. 
His domestic legislation was less successful. His 
excise scheme fiiiled, owing, it is plain, to the factious 
opposition of the Patriots ; his plan for creating 
bonded warehouses for storing goods (the duty being 
unpaid till such time as they were removed for con- 
sumption), also failed, owing to the interested opposi- 
tion of the great mercantile houses, while he himself, 
apparently from administrative jealousy, resisted Sir 
John Barnard^s scheme for reducing the interest on 
the public debt from four to three per cent. 

Long before he resigned office, he was, or affected 
to l)e, weary of his work. ^ I am plagued,'^ he said, 
^ with the thorns, and glutted with the fruits of 
power."^ ^ Few men,"^ he reiterated, ' should be minis- 
ters of state, for they see too much of the badness 
of mankind.'' He really believed himself necessary 
to the security of the Protestant succession, to the 
peace of Europe, to the prosperity of the nation. 
He had, and events proved that he was right, the 
meanest opinion of those who must needs succeed 
him. He predicted their policy as accurately as he 
divined their motives and estimated their abilities ; 
and he did all he could, during the three years in 
which he survived his official life, to thwart or sus- 
tain tliem, as occasion required. It was natural for 
a cynic like Lord Hervey, when Walpole stated his 
own opinion of his own value to the country, to 



88 SIJR ROBERT WALPOLE, 

comment^ that ^ acute and intelligent as this minister 
Avas_, he was unable to discern that nobody^s under- 
standing is so much superior to the rest of mankind^ 
as to be missed in a week after he is gone/ 

Walpole had scanty knowledge of books or letters. 
He read very little^ and wrote less. He carried into Par- 
liament a little smattering of school learning, and was 
fond of quoting Horace. But though he quoted like a 
statesman^ he knew his book only like a schoolboy. 
On one occasion he misstated a passage^ committing 
a grammatical error for which in his youth he would 
have been birched. He was corrected by Pulteney, 
stuck to his version, wagered a guinea that he was 
right, and agreed to refer the dispute to the clerk 
of the House of Commons. Of course it was given 
against him, and he chucked the coin he had lost 
across the floor to his critic and antagonist. ^ This/ 
said Pulteney, ' is the only guinea I ever got from 
the Government."* 

According to those who knew him best, Walpole 
invariably kept to one rule on all public questions. 
^ He never would, be the wrong ever so extensive^ 
and the circumstances ever so flagrant, allow^ to the 
best of his power, parliamentary inquiries.'* The rule 
has been adopted by later statesmen, who have applied 
it as much to cover their own misdeeds, as to save 
an existing administration in critical times. It has 
now become a tradition of cabinets. But resistance 
to it is the duty of those whose interests are involved 
in government, from the shareholders in a joint-stock 



EARL OF OBFORD. 89 

eompaiiy to the citizens of a community. The only 
guarantee of public honour is publicity^ for the only 
protection rogues have is secresy. 

Macaulay has commented on AYalpole's contempt 
for letters^ and has argued that the decline of lite- 
rature during the period of Walpole^s administration 
was due to this minister's indifference to literary men. 
But the discouragement is probably overstated. Pope 
was wealthy^ thanks in the first instance to Swift's 
patronage. Gay^ who had lost his money in the 
South Sea scheme^ was protected by the mad Duchess 
of Queensberry. The Opposition was not unwilling 
to encourage the writers of their party. But lite- 
ratm'e^ like other phenomena of productive energy^ 
has its cycles of barrenness^ its poor and abundant 
crops. The strife of faction however made the for- 
tune of one orenius. Georw the Second hated music 
and poetry. It is said that he professed to have 
admired one orchestral passage^ and that its repetition 
was ordered. The players went through their pieces. 
At last they began to tune their fiddles, and George 
shouted out in ecstasy^ that now they were playing 
what he liked. But to spite his son, he made 
Handel's fortune, though he expressed his contempt 
at this rivalry of fiddlers, this contest between 
tweedledum and tweedledee. ^The heat which this 
musical strife provoked, bade fair,' says Horace AVal- 
pole, ^to recall the green and blue iactions of the 
Eastern Empire.' For a time, an anti-Handelist was 
looked on as an anti-courtier. 



90 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 

In 1 741, a motion was made in both Houses^ the 
object of which was to advise Walpole^s dismissal 
from office. It was lost in the lower House by more 
than two to one; in the upper by nearly an equal 
majority. In the new Parliament^ the veteran minis- 
ter counted on a majority of forty. In a very short 
time^ he was contemplating the alternatives of Down- 
ing Street and the Tower. The first discomfiture 
was the election of Dr. Lee as Chairman of Com- 
mittees^ in opposition to Earle^ Sir Robertas can- 
didate. He was beaten by four votes^ and you can 
guess^ says an eyewitness^ how the victors huzzaM^ 
after being defeated for twenty years. The old 
Duchess of Marlborough was denied the satisfaction 
of seeing this reverse. She was on her deathbed^ 
and apparently insensible. ' She must be blistered/ 
said her physician^ ' or she will die."' ' I won^t be 
blistered/ she shouted out^ with her last remains of 
strength; ^ and I won'^t die.'' 

After Walpole^s resignation came the struggle. 
He took an earldom^ and secretly a pension. His 
eldest son had been made a peer in 1723. He got 
his natural daughter by Miss Skerrett — he married 
the mother — the rank and title of an earFs daughter. 
The victors resolved to punish him. Their first 
attempt failed Ijy 253 votes to 250, the largest 
number^ it is said^ which was ever told in the old 
House. Sick — even dying members were brought 
into the vote. One of these members had lost an 
only son at sea^ and the news had not reached him. 



EARL OF ORFOED. 91 

It was kept a secret till he was in the House, and 
then told him. But he did not .flinch. Horatio 
AValpole, the minister's brother, had an official 
residence as Auditor of the Exchequer, from which 
a private door led into the House of Commons. He 
was on the point of bringing* two or three sick 
members in, through this door_, but found that the 
Opposition had shot the bolt, and filled the lock 
through the keyhole, with fine sand. The Prince 
still urged Walpole's impeachment, and a motion for 
a committee to inquire into the conduct of the last 
twenty years, was lost by 244 to 242, on March 9. 
On ]\Iarch 23, the attack was renewed^ and a com- 
mittee of twenty-one was carried — to be appointed 
by ballot — by 245 to 242, Then the struggle was 
to put AYalpole^s friends on the committee. They 
only succeeded in nominating five. But the Opposi- 
tion was either satisfied or exhausted; the inquiry 
came to nothing, and Walpole was suffered to retire 
in peace. Of course the Duke of Newcastle, the 
patron of so many boroughs, gave additional proofs 
of his clumsy duplicity, and was the glad go-between 
to Pulteney. 

Walpole died a poor man. His debts, including 
a few trifling legacies, amounted to c^'50,oco. His 
estate was nominally worth ^^8000 a year, but was 
heavily mortgaged. In fact his fondness for 
Houghton had endangered its possession. He had 
not, like the Percevals and the Pelhams, built up a 
fortune out of public money. He was coarse and 



92 sin EGBERT WALPOLE. 

hard eiioug-li^ but not sordid. Nor did he use more 
cruelty than policy — according to the judgment of 
the day — required. He urged the condemnation of 
the Scotch lords in 1716. But the Tower was so 
negligently guarded, that Nithsdale and Wintour 
escaped from it, perhaps with his connivance. Had 
he lived and kept office, the rising of 1745 would 
probably never have occurred. Had it occurred^ he 
would have tempered the severities which followed 
it^ which roused a dangerous sympathy for the 
sufferers^ half justified the University of Oxford in 
paying for a picture of Flora Macdonald^ and fas- 
tened on William^ King George's favourite son^ the 
nickname of the Cumberland butcher. It was to 
this William that Walpole gave his last piece of 
advice. The Duke consulted him as to how he 
should best be able to avoid a marriage with a 
Danish j)rincess. ' Ask the King/ said Walpole^ ' for 
an establishment, and he will not press it.'' So the 
Duke escaped^ married to please himself, gave occa- 
sion to the Royal Marriage Act^ and is now chiefly 
rememljered as the presumed progenitor of the 
Princess Olive^ about whom our fathers gossiped^ 
and of Mrs. Ryves^ about whom our own generation 
has talked. 



ADAM SMITH. 



ADAM SMITH. 



The modem logic of pure reason was first revived 
in France. England^ on the other hand^ was the 
mother of the logic of experiment and induction. 
Nothing characterises these rival races more mark- 
edly than this fundamental distinction. The fore- 
fathers of the former science were Aquinas and 
Abelard^ the founder of the latter was Bacon. 
Similarly that theory of political economy which 
evolves the science from a few clear axioms^ was an 
outgrowth of French thought; while conversely the 
inductive side of the science has been — as yet im- 
perfectly, since the subject-matter is so vast — elabo- 
rated by English thinkers. Long before any writer 
in these islands had turned his attention to this 
subject, Nicolas Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, had dis- 
covered the true theory of the currency. Four 
centuries later, Adam Smith published his great 
work on the Wealth of Nations, in which the subject 
is treated from its inductive side. The scientific 
aspect of political economy has been contiinicd by 
many a French thinkei', till it was perfected by 



i)6 ADAM SMITH. 



Bastiat; tlie experimental aspect is, and long will be, 
imperfect. The former has had little practical effect 
on the conduct of public affairs^ exact and suggestive 
as the theory is^ for it has constantly been disfigured 
by errors and paradoxes^ and is distasteful from its 
very dogmatism ; the latter has grown with the 
expansion of political experience^ financial skilly social 
progress. The former may be condensed into a brief 
treatise ; the latter is^ as a coherent system^ still 
buried in a vast accumulation of statistics^ a mountain 
of unarranged and unexpounded facts. If you read 
the works of a French economist^ the very best of 
the school; you will find abundant illustrations from 
fictitious hypotheses. If you open a page of Adam 
Smith, you will be sure to light upon a fact^ an histo- 
rical parallel; a careful induction. 

I must say a few words on this ancient French 
economist, whose name has probably been heard by 
you for the first time this evening. As was the case 
with nearly every man of letters in that age^ Oresme 
was an ecclesiastic. For some years he was Master 
of one of the Colleges in the University of Paris, and 
became successively Archdeacon of Bayeux, Dean of 
Rouen, Treasurer of Sainte Chapellc; and ultimately^ 
in 1377; Bishop of Lisieux in Normandy. At some 
time or other he was Preceptor to Charles V^ sur- 
named the Wise. The ordinary date given for his 
appointment to this office is impossible^ for in 1360, 
Charles had no time for any other instruction than 
that in the school of adversity and patience. In 



ABAJI SJIITIL 97 



1356 occurred the battle of Poitiers, or Maupertuis, 
as it is now the fashion to call it, and during the 
interval between this catastrophe, and the Peace of 
Bretigni, Charles was the wandering regent of a 
shattered and debilitated kingdom, while his father 
was a prisoner in the Savoy. But 1360 may well 
have been the date of Oresme^s treatise, ' On the 
Function of Money/ 

Tliere was ample necessity at that crisis for the 
promulgation of a sound theory on this subject. The 
privilege of coining money is conferred on an ad- 
ministration in order that the subjects of a govern- 
ment may be, as far as possible, protected from 
private fraud. The legend of the Maltese money 
ran — iWtijES seel Jides — designating that the basis of 
the cun-ency must be laid in the integrity of those 
who issue it. Yet hardly a European government 
fulfilled this duty, even if they understood and 
acknowledged it. But the Kings of France were 
the principal offenders. They diminislied the amount 
of silver in their coins. This is a temporary wrong, 
a remediable offence. But they debased it also, a 
far more serious and lasting evil. Philip the Fair 
was threatened with excommunication by Boniface 
the Eighth, for this fraud, and was branded as long 
as time lasts, by Dante, for his offence. Even 
Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, remonstrated 
with the French monarchs and denounced their 
practices. Seldom have excommunication and reproof 
been more richly merited, more justly launched. 

H 



98 ADAM SMITH, 



But the gTcatest ofl'ender in this particular was the 
unlucky John, the prisoner of Poitiers, whose chival- 
ric character has been described by Froissart, and 
lauded in a hundred romances. Nothing, in my 
opinion, points out more clearly the terrible gap 
which divided the knight from the peasant, during 
the fourteenth century, than the contrast between 
this monarches historical reputation and his actual 
deserts. Owing to this King^s practices, whom the 
romancers called the Good, the value of the currency 
underwent seventy changes in ten years. John took 
an oath of his moneyers that they would keep his 
frauds a profound secret, especially from the mer- 
chants, and would do their diligence to deceive the 
i:)ublie, with a threat that, if they gave an oppor- 
tunity of detection, they should suffer the penalties 
of treason. There have been times when sentimental 
novelists have striven to harmonise the lighter and 
darker shades of character in heroes like Claud Duval, 
Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram, and Jack Sheppard. It 
is to such panegyrists that we may relegate the task 
of describing a monarch, who might have been a 
gallant knight on the battle-field, but who was a 
smasher in his own mint, a swindler of his people. 
It was these practices which Oresme reprobated. 

I have already commented on the fact, that histo- 
rians are apt to overlook the economical side of their 
subject. This folly or negligence, as it comes from 
the mannerism which Macaulay used to ridicule as 
concessions to the ^ dignity of history,"^ or from sheer 



ADAJf SMITH. 99 

igrioraiice_, leaves us constantly in the dark as to the 
real causes which aid the progress or hurry the 
do^Tifall of nations. To me the weakness of France 
during the century 1340-1440^ seems to be directly 
traceable to economical causes^ to the universal dis- 
trust which these royal frauds induced. All nations^ 
as they emerge from barbarism^ adopt a currency, 
the circulation of which is conditioned by a few 
intelligible principles. A man takes money to get 
rid of it, because it facilitates exchange, and is of all 
commodities that which is most easily sold. But to 
facilitate exchange and to be easily sold^ it must be^ 
for a time at leasts possessed of an intrinsic^ un- 
changeable value^ and must be capable of instant 
valuation. To debase the currency is to destroy the 
very essence of its utility, and to force society back 
into barbarism and isolation. Exactly similar results^ 
though perhaps of a less serious kind^ attended^ as ^ 
I stated in a previous lecture^ the frauds of Henry 
the Eighth and the Protector Somerset. Results of 
an analogous kind always follow, in various degrees^ 
those unhappy concessions to the nostrums of such 
currency quacks^ as persuade governments to commit 
an offence to which they are only too prone^ the issue 
of paper money on the security of public debts. 

It was because there is no part of the theory of 
political economy which is so strictly logical as the 
demonstration of the function w^hich money performs 
in civilised society, and because the same or nearly 
the same exactness belongs to the exposition of the 

H 2 



loo ADAIf SMITE, 

process by which wealth is produced^ that the French 
economists have been so successful in these tw^o parts 
of the science. It is when they come to deal with 
the phenomena of exchange^ with the influence 
which custom or conventional usage has upon social 
life^ and with the circumstances which modify the 
distribution of wealthy that their system breaks down 
for want of induction, and because they adopt hypo- 
theses instead of facts. They construct a formal 
garden, the plants of which they select, and the 
cultivation of which they arrange, and neglect to 
study the pasture which lies outside this factitious 
parterre, and in which nature supersedes art. For 
the study of political economy — the latest and the 
most difiicult of the sciences — is the estimate of 
society and politics from the vast aggregate of ex- 
perience, as it denotes the causes which direct or 
control the industrial energies of different commu- 
nities, and attempts to discover the circumstances 
under which the material interests of social life vary 
in kind or in degree. 

What little we know of the personal history of 
Adam Smith is from the pen of Dugald Stewart, 
and was composed a few years after this great 
economist had ended his quiet uneventful life. The 
posthumous son of a Custom-house officer at Kirk- 
caldy, he was carefully brought up by his mother, 
whose years were extended to within six of his own 
death, and who constantly lived with her illustrious 
son, as she was affectionately tended by him. Smith 



ADAM SMITH. loi 



received his first teaching' in his native town^ at one 
of those schools which were even then of infinite 
vakie to Scotchmen, and the estabhshment of which 
was of primary interest and care to the founders of 
the Scotch lleformation. When he was fourteen 
years old^ he was transferred to the University of 
Glasgow. 

During the reign of Charles the Second, a Glasgow 
merchant, zealous to maintain Episcopacy in Scot- 
land, granted funds towards the establishment of 
exhibitions in Balliol College, Oxford, the recipients 
of this benefaction being chosen out of the students 
of the Glasgow University, and by that Corporation. 
A few years afterwards. Episcopacy fell, but the 
benefaction remained, and grew considerably in value. 
There are ten such exhibitions held by students of 
Balliol College, and there is no doubt that the great 
reputation of this Academical society is due in no 
slight degree to the annual selection of some of the 
most promising young Scotchmen at Glasgow for 
fiu'ther instruction in a College which is peculiarly 
connected with Scotland. When he was seventeen 
years old Adam Smith was nominated to one of these 
exhibitions, and proceeded to Oxford, where he re- 
sided, it seems, uninterruptedly for seven years. But 
he never graduated at this University. 

^\^len Smith left Scotland for Oxford, his native 
country was miserably poor. The annalists of British 
commerce, Anderson and Macpherson, have very 
little to tell us of Scotland's trade and manufactures. 



102 ADAM SMITH. 



A linen manufacture existed in the Lowlands^ and 
especially on the eastern coast^ but it was of small 
proportions. For the greater part of the eighteenth 
century Scotland sent no revenue to the Imperial 
treasury, the scanty proceeds of taxation being swal- 
lowed up in local charges and bounties. It took five 
or six days to travel from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. 
The country gentlemen resented the Methuen treaty, 
and the scarcity of claret, and entered into arrange- 
ments with smugglers for a supply of French wines 
and brandies. In 1 745, Duncan Forbes, Lord Presi- 
dent of Session, wrote to the Elgin justices and urged 
them ' not to be so impudently profligate as to screen 
these offenders/ wishes to know ' how they indivi- 
dually vote in favour of, or against, repressing this 
evil, in order that he may know what scoundrels to 
detest and avoid/ and concludes a long letter of 
reproach and warning by ' making his compliments 
to every one among them, who can lay his hand 
on his heart, and say that he is not a rascal/ 
Ten years after this a letter printed by Captain 
Dunbar informs us that there is no news, as the 
Edinburgh mail-bag was returned in a mistake for 
the London mail and vice versa. 

The lairds in the Highland districts exercised 
heritable jurisdiction. A gallaws was a regular 
part of the buildings on the estate, a hangman 
always figured in the chieftain^s retinue, unless, like 
Sir Ptobert Gordon, the laird found it more convenient 
to drown his local culprits. Death was inflicted for 



ADAJf SMiriL 103 



petty thefts^ imprisonment awarded without warrant 
or prospect of release, except when the local magnate 
was pacified. The peasantry seem to have acquiesced, 
or at most to have avenged themselves only by 
making strange charges of sorcery against their lords. 
These rights \vere abolished after the affair of 1745, 
not, it seems, because they were deemed unreasonable 
in themselves, but because they were abused, and 
made sul^servient to rebellion. Slavery, however, pre- 
vailed in Scotland till after Smith''s death, for the 
Colliers and S alters, who were excepted by name 
from the Scotch Habeas Corpus Act of 1701, were 
only finally emancipated in 1799. 

If the rural districts were thus under the dominion 
of the lairds, who had appropriated the land of their 
clansmen, and had engrafted a rigid system of entails 
on the ancient tenures of the countrv, the borouo["hs 
w^ere in no better plight. The property and revenues 
of these boroughs, the right of local taxation, patron- 
age, jurisdiction, and the election of representatives 
to Parliament, w^ere in the hands of small self-elected 
bodies. Droll stories are told of the way in which 
this patronage w^as sold or distributed. For example, 
the oflSce of town-clerk at Forfar was held for twenty 
years by an idiot. In 1831, the county voters in the 
whole of Scotland w^ere only 2500, many of whom 
had neither property nor residence in the county ibr 
which they held the franchise. The electors in the 
sixty-six boroughs amounted to 1440 only. Thirty- 
three electors returned the representatives for Glas- 



104 ADAM SMITH. 



gow and Edinburgh. We can under these circum- 
stances understand the Scotch member who boasted 
that he had never been present at a debate or absent 
at a division^ and that he had only once voted con - 
scie ntious ly^ and then found that he was in the 
wrong. Nor again can we wonder that even as 
late as 1820^ when there was a sharp contest between 
the families of Grant and Duff for the representation 
of the Elgin burghs^ the Duffs kidnapped the baillie 
of Elgin^ and a Mr. Dick^ two of the opposite side^ 
and carrying them off to Sutherlandshire^ kept them 
there till it was too late to vote. The character of 
these Scotch municipalities was retained unchanged 
till 1833. But we need not be surprised that when 
the change was made^ a Marquis of Bute moved that 
the Scotch Municipalities Reform Bill should be read 
that day six months^ and that an Earl of Haddington 
entered his protest on the journals of the Lords^ and 
predicted all sorts of danger to the constitution from 
the change. 

Towards the close of Adam Smith'^s life Dundas 
ruled despotically in Scotland. Three years after his 
deaths j\Iuir was prosecuted for sedition^ the words 
which he used being what is now every-day criticism 
on existing administrations. Braxfield^ the Jeffreys 
among Scotch judges, raged in the style of Jeffreys,, a 
hundred years after such a monster became impossible 
on the English bench. ' Bring me prisoners/ he 
shouted, ' and I will find them law.'' And when a 
pliant jury convicted Muir, he inflicted an illegal 



ADAJf SMITH, 



sentence^ adding that he increased the penalty because 
the audience applauded Muir^s eloquent defence. The 
Liberals who, like Horner and Jeffreys and Brougham 
and Sidney Smith, dared to keep alive the principles 
of freedom in Edinburgh seventy years ago, imperilled 
their fortunes, their liberty, and even their lives, by 
their courage. ^Miat wonder that enfranchised Scot- 
land has raised her monument on Calton Hill to the 
martjTs of the eighteenth century, and has all but 
entirely repudiated the principles which were domi- 
nant and despotic little more than a generation ago. 
In talking of the Reign of Terror in France, people 
forget that there was as frightful a reign of terror 
in ^Ireland, and that there were reactionary if not 
revolutionary tribunals in Great Britain during the 
same epoch. 

Mr. ^Macculloch, without stating his reasons, avers 
that Smith does not appear to have felt any peculiar 
respect for the great University at which he com- 
pleted his education. I am not aware that he speaks 
of his personal relations to it except in one passage, 
where, acknowledging his election as Lord Rector of 
Glasgow, he mentions it as part of his debt of grati- 
tude to that institution, that it sent him to Oxford. 
In truth, it cannot be doubted that however other 
people may have conducted themselves at Oxford, 
Smith derived great advantage from his studies 
there. His reputation in his native country was 
acknowledged immediately on his return. The fact 
is, just as eminent scholars have, from time to time. 



io6 ADAM SMITH, 



proceeded from Eton^ because diligence and genius 
will exhibit themselves under the most untoward 
circumstances^ so men could study with profit even 
in that^ the darkest age of Academical history. 
There is reason for calling that a dark age. There 
is a consistent tradition of the period during which 
Smith lived in Oxford^ to the effect that an enter- 
prising cat was found in All Souls^ library^ but starved 
to deaths and dried into a mummy. All Souls^ had 
the best college library in Oxford, owing to the nuga- 
tory munificence of Codrington, 

AYith one notable exception_, that of the wonderful 
Puritan movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries^ which sprang from Mildmay^s College in 
Cambridge, every great upheaval in learning, politics^ 
and religion,, which England has witnessed, has had 
its beginnings in Oxford. It was there that Merton^ 
during the calm revolution of Henry the Third^s 
reign, began to establish a system of secular learning, 
by excluding all monks and friars from the benefit 
of his, the earliest English college. The fruit of 
this policy is to be seen in the fact, that, within a 
century after this foundation, Wiklif, the bitter 
enemy of the monastic orders and the great eccle- 
siastics, learned his power of controversy within the 
walls of Merlonis College. To counteract WikliFs 
doctrine, another College was founded, from which, 
three centuries afterwards, came even a greater 
reformer than Wiklif. At the close of the fifteenth 
century, Oxford was the birthplace of physical 



ADAJf SMITH. 107 



science^ and tlie early nurse of that revived classical 
learning- which supplied the longnngs after ecclesi- 
astical reformation with critical powers^ for Linacre, 
the first English physiologist^ Colet^ Erasmus, More^ 
the earliest students of classical scholarship^ were 
among her sons. In those days, the energies of the 
University were not straitened by an Act of Uni- 
formity. 

After the great shock of the Reformation in 
Europe, and the vast^ well-nigh destructive changes 
which subsequently ensued, when both parties ap- 
pealed to the sword^ when liberty was sacrificed to 
municipal selfishness, and the quarrels of potentates 
begot that monstrous phantom^ the balance of pow^r^ 
Oxford fell under the baneful influence of Laud. 
She did not indeed submit without a struggle. The 
Puritan party^ dominant in Cambndge, was strong 
in Oxford. Nor was the High Church reaction a 
mere step into darkness. Laud, despite his blind 
bigotry^ his slavish sTiperstitions, his ungovernable 
temper, was a sincere lover of learning. He pen- 
sioned Chillingworth^ and promoted Hales. But in 
great Academies, no patronage can compensate for 
the loss of freedom. Oxford was weakened by the 
discipline of Laud, and was demoralized by l)ecoming 
the head-quarters of the Cavaliers. The Laudian 
regimen became the tradition of the University. 
Its Convocation, after the Restoration, solemnly pro- 
claimed the divine right of Kings, and as solemnly 
proscribed the priiici[)les of human freedom. It 



io8 ADAH SMITH, 

clung* to these tenets after the Revolution^ and 
became the focus of the Jacobite faction. In the 
first half of the eighteenth century^ it was the 
hiding-place of the Pretender^s adherents. The 
Tory squires sent their sons to Oxford. The heads 
of Colleges and the heads of the University^ made 
one by Laud''s pernicious legislation^ protected these 
boys^ when they made the streets ring with curses 
on King George and blessings on King James. 
Sometimes soldiers were sent to keep these young 
rebels^ and old traitors in awe. Then there was 
outward quiet^ and the Academical authorities shut 
themselves up in their official lodgings^ to write 
diaries, to complain of Hanoverian tyranny, to drink 
their port, and to symbolise their attachment to 
the fallen dynasty by passing their wine over the 
water-jug, while they swore allegiance to the ruling 
powers, on pain of losing their emoluments. In the 
very year in which Smith left Oxford, a treasonable 
riot occurred in the streets, the culprits being mem- 
bers of Balliol College. They were screened by 
Purnell, the Warden of New College and Vice- 
Chancellor. But Walpole cared little for these things. 
That minister, who is said to have held one tenet 
strongly, that every man has his price, was alive to 
another more general and more generous rule, that 
every fool should have his way. The audacity of these 
academics culminated, when, in 1734, the University 
complimented George the Second on the marriage 
of his daughter to the Prince of Orange, and hinted, 



ADA2I SMITH. 109 



as well as it could^ on the blessing's which a former 
Prince of Orange had been enabled to confer on the 
nation. 

It will surprise no one to hear that this noisy 
disaffection was coupled with gross ignorance^ and 
still more gross brutality. What the condition of 
education was in the old Universities during the 
eighteenth century, is pLain from the novels of the 
period. The Professorships at Oxford were turned 
into sinecures. The occupants of those offices did 
not pretend to teach anybody. Even long after the 
period to which I refer^ up to the time when Acade- 
mical reform was seriously taken in hand fourteen 
years ago^ hardly a fraction of the University pro- 
fessors undertook any active duty. Adam Smithes 
criticism on their utter uselessness in his time is well 
known. 

The age was eminently coarse. But the fugitive 
literature of Oxford was more coarse than that whicli 
was current with the general public. Grub Street 
and Hog Lane would not have put forth such abomi- 
nations as the speeches of Terrce Jilius or the rhymes 
on the Oxford Toasts. Nor was this brutality con- 
fined to words. I have spoken of the turbulence of 
those young men. In the very year in which Adam 
Smith left Oxford^ the undergraduates of Balliol 
College murdered a college servant^ under circum- 
stances of the grossest barbarity. The narrative of 
this crime is to be found in a pamphlet written at the 
time^ which^ for grave and earnest comment on the 



no ADAiV SMITH. 

atrocity, might have been written by Smith himself. 
The culprits were protected by Theophilus Leigh, 
Master of the College, who owed his election to an 
intrigue, and held his place for fifty-two years. 

I said above that out of a college, founded for the 
express purpose of doing battle with the tenets pro- 
pagated by the great reformer of the fourteenth 
century, came, exactly three centuries after the date 
of its foundation, a greater reformer. Perhaps at 
no age of the history of Christianity had all its 
vital principles fallen more completely into sleep 
than during the first half of the eighteenth century. 
Then began the revival inaugurated by the two 
Wesleys. The elder son of the rector of Epworth 
was a fellow of Lincoln College, and here established 
that enthusiastic movement which spread over the 
British Islands and many of her colonies. Wesley^s 
infiuence, like all religious influences, was social also, 
and civilisation owes to him and his sectaries that 
they were, if not precisely the first, the most en- 
ergetic and powerful preachers in that anti-slavery 
crusade, which gained its first legal victory in 1771, 
when the judges decided, in the case of Charles 
Somerset, that slavery cannot exist on British soil, 
and has nearly consummated its beneficent aims, 
after a century of uninterrupted struggles. 

I will not dwell on the latest of these Academical 
developments ; on what has been called the Tractarian 
movement, and last of all on the philosophical liberal- 
ism of Oxford in our own day. It is sufficient to 



ADAJr SMITH, III 



point out how continuous has been the influence of 
Academical activity on Enii'lish thouMit, and how 
far removed one Englisli Universit}' is^ at leasts from 
the mere function of a schoohiiaster in dead languages, 
and -an extinct philosophy. 

Originally Smith was destined for Anglican orders, 
the preparation of candidates for this office having 
been the original purpose of SnelFs foundation. But 
he abandoned this prospect, returned to Scotland, 
lived a few years at Edinburgh, and in 1751 was 
appointed to a professorship at Glasgow. Here he 
remained for twelve years, when he accepted the post 
of travelling tutor to the young Duke of Buccleugh. 
Stewart laments that Smith arrived at that decision, 
and suggests that the interruption of his studies was 
a public loss. It would be more correct to say, that 
we owe the ^ Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of 
the Wealth of Nations'' to this interruption in his 
previous habits. The three years during which he 
travelled in France suggested to him the conception, 
and to some extent supplied him withThe materials 
of his great work. ^ 

Adam Smith visited France immediately on the 
conclusion of the Seven Years War. The Peace of 
Paris, which Sismondi says was the most humiliating 
which France had ever undergone since that of Bre- 
tigni, stripped her of her colonies in the New World, 
and her settlements and factories in the East. Lally 
had succumbed to Clive, Montcalm to Wolfe. 
England, on the other hand, was generally victorious. 



112 ADAM SMITTL 

But the victory was obtained by profuse expenditure. 
The public debt — for it was chiefly by loans that 
the war was sustained — was doubled under the elder 
Pittas administration. One war begat another. The 
charges of the Seven Years War^ when the reaction 
of jDcace came, were grievously oppressive^, and the 
Government was at its wit's end for money. In an 
evil hour they resolved to tax the colonies by a 
stamp-duty, and to reimburse the East India Com- 
pany for an advance to the treasury, by a duty on 
tea^ to be levied on New England. Everybody 
knows the story of the resistance to the Stamp Act^ 
of the riot in Boston harbour_, of the Declaration and 
the War of Independence. The reaction of that war 
precipitated the French Revolution. The proclama- 
tion of the Duke of Brunswick gave that revolution 
the unity which it needed^ and half justified its 
atrocities. It was followed by the great convulsion 
through which Europe passed at the beginning of 
the present century. The effects of this convulsion 
will not pass away for generations. 

Two years after Smith quitted Paris^ Corsica was 
ceded to France by the Genoese. The relations of 
Corsica and Genoa are a long story. They are in 
little^ the parallel to the relations between the East 
India Company^ India^ and the British Empire. In 
her difl^iculties^ the republic of Genoa had consulted 
her leading merchants on the state of her finances. 
The merchants — for, as a rule^ mercantile credit is 
higher than the credit of a government — came to 



ADAJf SMITH. 113 



the rescue. They retrieved the finances^ and received 
privileges for the Bank of Genoa in exchange. The 
Bank began to make war and acquire territory on its 
own account^ after the fashion and the folly of the 
time, and conquered Corsica. It was the box of 
Pandora^ withouFTTope at the bottom. Finding the 
possession mischievous^ the Bant presented this per- 
nicious estate to the Genoese republic. At the 
beginning of the eighteenth century _, Genoa was in 
a state of chronic war with the savage islanders of 
Corsica^ just as Turkey now is^ T^4th those of Crete. 
My hearers may remember the story of Theodore 
NeuhofF^ who^ in 1736^ appeared at Aleria^ as a 
mysterious stranger,, whose riches seemed boundless 
to those barbarous people^ how he was made king, 
and how, after checkered fortunes, he quitted the 
island^ came to England, got up a new expedition, 
failed, returned to London, and was thrown into 
prison for debt, lived in prison there seven years, 
and when released by the despair of his creditors, 
was kept from starving by the efforts of Horace 
Walpole, and how at last he died in such poverty, 
that Walpole could contrast the fallen monarches 
experience of the possession of a kingdom and the 
want of bread in a couplet. Too late, Paoli came 
to the rescue. After the Peace of Paris, the Genoese 
sold the island to France, despite the intrigues of 
North. It was the worst bargain which the house of 
Bourbon ever made, for a twelvemonth after the sale 
was completed. Napoleon was born, a French subject, 

I 



114 ADAJf SMITH, 



and the founder of a dynasty which has certainly 
dethroned the Bourbons^ and may hereafter extinguish 
royalty in France. The story of CEdipus is rivalled, 
by the efforts which Louis XV made to annex Cor- 
sica to France. 

Certainly, if the maxims of good government can 
be best learned by witnessing the consequences of 
their violation, no better study could be found for 
the economist than the condition of France at this 
time. Four assemblies, called parliaments, sat in four 
places. There was no true commercial intercourse 
between the several provinces of the kingdom. The 
lands of the nobles and the church were free from 
taxation ; those of the peasants were afflicted by an 
arbitrary taille and an equally arbitrary corvee. 
Agricultural improvement was impossible when an 
income-tax was levied on the visible means of the 
farmer — ^just as it is in Ireland, wherever the rent 
is raised to the highest possible amount by letting 
annual tenancies by auction. All grades in the army 
were closed to those who were not ennobled ; all 
industry was harassed by arbitrary restrictions. The 
King^s officers were petty but absolute tyrants, and 
tyranny is always most grinding when it is exercised 
in a narrow area and on few victims. The crimi- 
nal law, as is always the case under despotic go- 
vernments, be they monarchical or aristocratic, was 
frightfully severe. Sudden and secret arrest was 
everybody's risk ; torture was freely adopted in order 
to obtain convictions; and punishment was inflicted 



ADA.V SMITH. Hi 



with every refinement which a diabolical ingenuity 
could inflict. Our government^ during the same 
epochs was savage enough^ was unrelenting^ Draco- 
nian in its attempts to protect property by the free 
use of the gallows ; but the French of the eighteenth 
century are said to have united the manners of 
monkeys to the ferocity of tigers. The execution 
of Damiens^ for example^ was prolonged through 
hours of torture. 

Political servitude is the parent of atheism; for 
men cease to believe in God when all they know of 
government is despotism^ when they cannot recognise 
God^s moral qualities in man^ and when religion is 
parodied by its professed teachers. Again^ it cannot 
be by accident that sceptics in religion are absolutists 
in politics. This combination has been witnessed over 
and over again, Spinoza and Hobbes^ Bolingbroke and 
Ilume^ are only a few instances out of many. In the 
middle of the eighteenth century the Encyclopaedists 
represented this form of fatalism. ^The French/ 
said a gentleman to an eminent scholar and wit^ 
' worship Voltaire as some men worship Christ/ 
''And a very good Christ for a Frenchman/ was tlie 
reply. Join an acutely logical mind to an irreverent 
wit, fluent sentiment to a selfish heart, elegant taste 
to utter depravity, and smother the whole with un- 
sleeping and exuljerant vanity, and you get tlie French 
gentleman of the old monarchy. Voltaire was a little 
better, and Rousseau a little worse, than this model. 
Such people were fairly imitated in England by 

I 2 



ii6 ADAM SMITH, 



Chesterfield and Horace Walpole. The example was 
repeated in its coarser and more revolting traits by 
Wilkes and Sandwich, and the rabble of the Med- 
menham monks. 

Tlie head of the French social system^, of a troop 
of profligate courtiers^ and still more profligate 
churchmen, was Louis XV. Brought up in the 
midst of flatterers, accustomed to indulge every 
caprice, he was utterly unable to reason ; habituated 
to indulge in every excess, his life was one long 
orgie. ' His religious belief/ says Sismondi, ' con- 
sisted in his dread of the Divine vengeance, and in 
the dogma of his own absolute power/ As he grew 
older, he grew worse. From Versailles to the Pare 
aux cerfs was one degradation, even for him ; from 
Pompadour to Du Barry was another. But withal 
he was strictly orthodox. The victims of his vile 
pleasures were carefully instructed in the Catholic 
faith. Though he wallowed in every pollution, he 
was anxious to keep his harem free from the heresies 
of the Jansenists. His title was that of ^the most 
Christian king ; ^ and, according to his interpretation 
of Christianity, he resolved to maintain his repu- 
tation. But in these days, no one could venture on 
telling, ever so superficially, the recorded details of 
his private life. 

There was, however, in Paris a society with which 
Adam Smith became intimately acquainted. This 
was the sect of the Economists, and, in particular, 
Turgot, Quesnay, Dupont de Nemours. These men 



ADAM SMITH. 117 



were theorists ; but the motive-eause of their specu- 
lations was a very practical evil. They saw that 
agriculture was depressed^ and that labour was de- 
graded. It was no use to attack the fiscal system 
under which France groaned. The Government had 
a short and sharp remedy against those who offended 
it ; and any attack, however indirect^ on the privi- 
leges possessed by the nobles and the clergy _, was a 
crime — the crime^ namely, of exciting hatred and con- 
tempt against the Government. Now it could not 
be denied that the measure of population is deter- 
mined by the success of agriculture, that the more 
subsistence the earth can be made to produce,, the 
more persons can subsist, and, indirectly, the larger 
the amount of that which, under the name of rent, 
the owner of the soil can appropriate to himself. 
Conversely, the more the farmer pays to the state, 
the less can he pay to the landlord. But as all pro- 
duce on which a price can be put is derived from 
the soil, and as all purchase is of such produce, to 
curtail a man'^s power of purchase is to check pro- 
duction, and to debar him from offering a price for 
such produce. But as rent is all that remains over 
and above the cost of producing that which the pro- 
ducer sells, it follows that to tax the purchaser is to 
diminish rent ; and, therefore, as all taxes ultimately 
fall upon rent, the policy of the French fiscal system 
seemed to lay taxation on the farmer, but in reality 
to lay it on the landlord. 

I will not occupy you with a dissertation on the 



ii8 ADAM SMITH. 



mixture of truth and error which this view of the 
economists contains. It is sufficient to point out 
that in distributing the gross price of any product 
other than those which are purely agricultural, the 
portion which is appropriated as rent is almost in- 
finitesimal. But there is a more obvious answer 
still. The logical inference of this argument would 
be to tax the rent of land in order to supply the 
pubhc revenue and local levies. But in this country^ 
the annual amount of local and imperial taxation is 
considerably in excess of the whole rent of land. 

The economists had another and a more rational 
purpose before them. Colbert, minister of finance 
in the early days of Louis XIV, saw the wealth 
which commerce and manufactures had bestowed on 
the Dutch, and sought to appropriate some portion 
of this prosperity to France. To effect this, he gave 
state assistance to manufacture, and, as far as France 
was concerned^ was the founder of the mercantile 
system in that country. Like most theories, this had 
a true side in it. Manufacturing countries are gene- 
rally wealthy^ and for two reasons. The very exist- 
ence of such industry proves that agriculture produces 
in excess over the needs of those who labour at it. 
Next, manufactures represent larger values in port- 
able shape than agricultural products do, and can 
therefore be more easily transported and sold. The 
power which this country possessed during the great 
continental war consisted in the value of, and demand 
for, its manufactures^ and the command which it 



ADAJf SMITH. 119 



thereupon had over tlie markets of the world. But 
the error of the French policy lay in the fact^ that 
these advantages are easily seen, and when seen are 
certainly acted on ; that the instinct of self-interest 
needs no stimulus, and that industry finds out its 
own good best. AVe have learned, but only lately, 
that a Government is the worst judge of the way 
in which the capital of those for whom it consults 
can be administered or invested. When Governments 
affect to help, they retard the progress they pa- 
tronise. 

Even here, however^ the French theorists fell into 
a strange delusion. They argued that nature does 
nothing for man in manufactures^ forgetting that the 
labour of man is busied in appropriating certain forms 
of matter and their qualities^ by means of certain 
natural forces. To discuss whether nature does most 
for man in agriculture or manufactures^ apart from 
the illogical distinction of processes not radically 
distinguishable^ is to debate which of two scissor- 
blades contributes most to severing a piece of cloth. 
Adam Smith was not free from the fallacy into which 
his teachers fell, and the modern student is constantly 
able to detect the influence of the French theory on his 
mind, though on many occasions he refutes its errors. 

That which Adam Smith got from the French 
economists was the habit of analytical research, exer- 
cised upon economical phenomena. I do not say that 
political economy began with him, but I can assert 
that its method does. His teachers ar^nied from 



I20 ADAM SMITH. 



a priori, or what they believed to be apriori, principles, 
and examined the facts by these principles. Smith 
applied an inductive method to his facts^ and^ as far 
as possible^ verified his hypotheses by observation. 
Hence his work is full of illustrations^ is copious in 
examples^ whenever illustration or example could be 
obtained. And just as succeeding economists have 
used his method, and in so far as they have gone to 
history and statistics,, so they have been able to 
correct Smith ; for in his day history was uncritical, 
statistics were imperfect and inexact. But in so far 
as they have departed from his method^ and suffered 
themselves to evolve the science from their own 
theories^ they have^ even the ablest among them^ 
fallen into notorious fallacies. 

The quickness of Smithes inductive power was as 
noteworthy as his diligence in collecting materials 
wdiere materials were forthcoming. For example^ he 
was well aware that the mass of the English peasantry 
passed from a state of penury and dependence in the 
thirteenth century into one of affluence and pros- 
perity in the fifteenth. The peasant in the first 
epochs as described by the early English law-books, 
is a totally different person from the yeoman of 
Fortescue^s age. Smith rightly divined that the mass 
of the agriculturists must have passed through a 
metayer system before they arrived at independence. 
And the facts recently discovered bear out this hy- 
pothesis. After the great social convulsion of the 
fourteenth century^ the greatest which modern history 



ADAM SMITH, 121 



lias iindoro'one, — clue to the oceiuTonce of the great 
l)hi^Hie in the year 1349, — it became impossible for the 
landowners to cany on their estates by hired labour, 
for the wages of labour rose at once by 50 to 100 per 
cent., and there had long existed a custom of com- 
muting serf-labour, never very profitable, for a money 
payment. The attempt to revive this serf-labour led, 
beyond the shadow of a doubt, to the uprising of 
1381, known lamiliarly as Wat Tyler^s rebellion. In 
the interval, and indeed after this event, (for the de- 
mands of the Blackheath rioters were effectually con- 
ceded,) it became necessary for the landowners to let 
their lands. As the new tenants had not enough 
capital to stock these fiirms, (for in these days the 
stock on a well-tilled farm w^as worth three times as 
much as the land,) the landlord leased farm and stock 
together, on consideration of receiving a certain por- 
tion of the produce. This is the mctaijer system 
which has prevailed in Southern France, and generally 
in Italy from the days of Imperial Rome. In about 
seventy years, so great w^as the prosperity of the 
English yeomanry in those days, the farmer was able 
to carry on his business with his own stock, and, in 
many cases, to purchase the land on which he lived. 
I have supplied you with the verification of Smithes 
hypothesis, but the hypothesis itself is an induction 
of singular sagacity. 

The hardest work which any writer oi- thinker has 
before him is to separate himself from the habitual 
and tyrannous prejudices of the age in which he lives. 



122 ADAM SMITH. 

A prejudice is a judgment, but an imperfect judg- 
ment. It is because it simulates an exact inference 
that the person who holds it^ or, to be more correct, 
is occupied by it, is irritated at any attempt to dis- 
turb it. It is because attempts to disturb prejudice 
are generally made by the emission of other pre- 
judices^, the weak points of which are recognised by 
the adversary, that the attempt is constantly a failure. 
Even when the refutation of an error is overwhelming, 
men are not apt to be thankful to their instructor. 

The dreamer in Horace, before whose eyes^ as he 
sat in an empty theatre^ and applauded what he 
thought were the scenes^ the processions^ the poetry 
of noble tragedies^ had little thanks for his friends 
when they cm^ed him of his delusion^ and thereby 
took away the pleasure of his existence. ' During my 
whole life,'' said a friend of Tooke the economist^ * I 
have been laboriously engaged in gathering and bind- 
ing up my faggot of notions, — how can you expect 
that I shall be grateful to you for unloosing and 
scattering them away?"* The fate of reformers is 
well known^ — the indifference of lukewarm friends, 
the undisguised hostility of bitter enemies. As long 
as loss and injury are the portion of those who labour 
to speak wisely and do justly^ there is no immediate 
risk of rash and sudden change. ^ So you intend/ 
said a Yorkshire nobleman to Wilberforce^ ^ to reform 
society. I will show you the destiny of all reformers -/ 
and he pointed to a picture of the Crucifixion. 

It must be admitted that in Adam Smithes days^ 



ADAM SMITH. 123 



when l)ooks were dear, and confined to the educated 
few^ when there was no popidar press, and no means 
for reachino' and teaching the mass of the people, the 
intolerance of prejudiced authority was far less marked 
than it is in later times. Smithes political economy 
was a war against privilege and monopoly, as all 
honest political economy is, whether it be privilege on 
the part of landlords or masters, peasants or workmen. 
But it awakened no violent opposition, because it 
awakened no immediate fear. Smith was a Scotch 
professor^ and the monopolists of the age felt no 
serious alarm at the speculations of a north country 
thinker. It is only in these later days that vested 
interests begin to dread and detest the intellectual 
activity of the ^wild men of the cloister.^ I have 
indeed seen one violent attack on the ' Wealth of 
Nations'^ in the preface and notes of Mickle^s Lusiad. 
But Mickle wished to get patrons for his work among 
the holders of East India Stocky and Smith had 
severely commented on the monopoly of the great 
Company. In Smithes time the manufacturers and 
merchants were the great advocates of protection^, and 
Smith thought that they would cling to it with more 
tenacity than the agriculturists did to their bounties 
and corn laws. He was wrong. Thirty years after 
the great economist's deaths Tooke drew up the 
memorable Merchants'* petition. Simultaneously^ and 
as if by contrast^ Vansittart produced his last budget. 
It took more than a quarter of a centuiy before the 
Corn Laws were abandoned^ and they were given up 



124 ADAJI SMI TIL 



under the pressure of a formidable agitation^ and a 
frightful famine. The event was followed by the 
wreck of traditional parties^ and the establishment of 
new j^arties under old names. Even now the battle 
of protection and freedom is being waged^ though on 
a different material^ and under a disguise^ in the 
pressure of a similar crisis^ and with the prospect of 
the same political phenomena. \^ 

In the days of Adam Smith statesmen thought 
that money was wealthy and that a country which 
permitted the export of the precious metals^ unless 
indeed it produced them from its own mines^ and in 
excess of its ownwants^ was wilfully inviting poverty. 
He demonstrated that money was distributed over the 
world just as all other merchandise is^ and by the 
same machinery. We now know that all the per- 
fection of the mechanism by which money fulfils the 
functions of currency^ consists in the multitude of 
transactions which the least possible quantity of 
money can effect^ and that communities strive as far 
as possible to economise the currency which they 
retain. 

The statesmen of the age believed that it was a 
matter of paramount necessity that a country^s ex- 
ports should exceed its imports. Adam Smith de- 
veloped the exactly opposite doctrine. He taught 
that a profitable trade consists in getting as much 
foreign goods as possible^ with as little British goods 
as possible; that the difference between the two is 
the profit on the transaction ; that the goods of one 



ADAM SMITH. 125 

country are oxchanq'ed an^ainst the g-oods of another; 
and that the \\'isdom of the merchant is contained 
in finding tlie market in wliich he can sell at the 
highest price, and buy at the lowest. He therefore 
repudiated those expedients for securing a special 
market for British produce, which was in his day the 
main object of commercial diplomacy, and was till 
the time of Canning, who gave liis instructions to 
our representative at the Hague, at that time nego- 
tiating certain concessions, in characteristic doggrel — 

' In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch 
Is giving too little, and asking too much.' 

We now know that communities which hamper their 
foreign trade with restrictions deliberately choose the 
worst market for their produce. 

The Economists taught that land was wealth. 
Adam Smith proved — and it was a prodigious step 
in advance — that labour was the cause and the sole 
cause of wealth. Everybody knows how he illustrated 
this position, and conclusively proved it, in his famous 
chapter on the division of labour. The importance 
of this distinction cannot be overrated, for it gave 
a scientific explanation of the origin of rent, and a 
scientific refutation of those communistic theories 
which anticipate the reform of all social inequalities 
and grievances by a redistribution of land. For cTs 
long as people believe, or perhaps are led to believe, 
that land is wealth, so long will they, seeing that 
its original distribution is accidental or arbitrary, 



126 ADAM SMITH. 



claim as a matter of abstract justice^ which needs 
only sufficient power to become a matter of legis- 
lative action^ that such inequalities as have arisen 
from past circumstances should be rectified. The 
French economists of later times have never escaped 
from the influence of the thinkers who were associated 
with the early studies of Adam Smith, and therefore 
either argue^ as Proudhon and others^ that ^ property 
is theft/ or with Bastiat and the school which he has 
founded^ an equally untenable paradox^ that ' all the 
value which land has acquired is the result of labour/ 
Agrarian forms of socialism^ disputes about what 
really constitutes property in land^ and what the 
extent of that property is, have been the earliest 
causes of party strife in the social history of mankind. 
When communities subsist on agricultural produce, 
the necessity for defining this property becomes only 
more immediate and urgent than it does when the 
life of a people is spent in hunting and in pastoral 
pursuits. The battles of savage tribes are agrarian 
contests^ in which the prize is the fairest hunting- 
ground. The progress of civilised life necessitates 
the abandonment of these savage forms of sustenta- 
tion or amusement ; though^ so strangely are the 
extremes of habit continued, that, in a country like 
our own, it is still argued that the unlimited pre- 
servation of game is a legitimate and defensible 
practice, though it is clear that when any region 
which can be made to produce food by agricultural 
labour is abandoned to the maintenance of wild 



ABA.V SMITH, 127 



animals^ it cannot supply a hundredth part of the 
food which it might otlierwise afford. 

They who have studied the early history of civilis- 
ation, are aware how incessant has been the ven- 
tilation of the agrarian question. It appears in the 
fierce municipal struggles of ancient Greece. It is 
the most distinct fact in the mythical annals of 
Rome. The customs of feudal Europe referred with 
hardly an exception to the determination of the rights 
wliich the possessor of property in land might ex- 
ercise. The social question in Ireland^ where^ till 
within 250 years^ the custom of Celtic tenures existed 
and was recognised, has been uninterruptedly agra- 
rian. In our own country^ where the limits of 
private ownership in land have perhaps been extended 
farther than in any other community^ where private 
rights are conceded to the possessor more fully than 
elsewhere, the debate as to what must be the maxi- 
mum of private ownership has been greatly aided by 
the interpretation of the circumstances which ori- 
ginally necessitate the ownership in question. 

The joint or common o\ATLership of land^ enjoyed 
by the whole of any given society^ is abandoned for 
particular or private ownership on economical grounds. 
When land is cultivated by spade or plough^ it sus- 
tains many more people than could subsist on an 
equal area occupied l>y domesticated animals. But 
the cultivation of the soil is impossible except on the 
condition of permanent ownership. Tlie man who 
ploughs and sows expects to reap, and will not plough 



128 ADA3f SMITH. 

and sow^ unless the prospect of reaping is sufficiently 
guaranteed to him. In course of time^ this guarantee 
becomes permanent. For other reasons^ this per- 
manent occupation represents annually a higher value 
than is sufficient to compensate for the charges of cul- 
tivation^ and rent arises. Lastly, discretionary powers 
over land are accorded. But society cannot ever, except 
by an act of suicide^ abandon the right of asking 
and answering the following questions. Does the 
occupation^ the use^ the distribution of land^ subserve 
that purpose for which society originally abandoned 
its common right in the soil? Does the concession 
of these private rights^ intended to effect the fullest 
productiveness of land^ in any way militate against 
the end which it is always supposed to accomplish ? 
These rights were granted in order to ensure the 
fertility of the soil ; does the existing usufruct induce 
barrenness ? Is it always clear that private interest 
is sufficiently strong to prevent the waste of these 
powers^ which are, after all^ part of the national 
resources? Upon these and similar questions^ the 
economical interpretation of the theory of rent and 
the distribution of land has given and is giving 
an unassailable solution. Now Adam Smith was one 
of the earliest writers who recognised the social 
importance of the axiom^ that labour is the cause 
of wealthy and that the permanent occupation of the 
soil^ under intelligible, but under strictly limited 
conditions^ is necessarily antecedent to the economical 
exhibition of labour. 



ADAJf SMITH. 129 

But the special delusion of Adam Smithes day^ and 
that which he combated with the greatest effect, was 
the theory of protection. The plea on which the 
protection of particular industries is defended, is 
always the public good. Protection, in log-ical lan- 
guage, is always particular. If everybody were pro- 
tected, i. e. if every kind of labour were assisted by 
regulations and restrictions, were sheltered from com- 
petition, and provided with a market, it is plain no 
one would be the better, but every one would be the 
worse off for the machinery of legislation. Hence 
universal protection is as gross an absurdity as uni- 
versal over-production. Nor, for certain reasons, is 
the protection of particular trades and manufactures 
any real benefit to those who are enP'a^'ed in these 
occupations, except under particular circumstances, 
and to a limited extent ; though the removal of a 
protection once accorded may be, indeed ordinarily is, 
accompanied by a loss. It follows, then, that the 
restriction is the avowed sacrifice of the public to 
some public object, of which the legislature is con- 
ceived to be a better judge than the public can be. 
It is impossible to state a grosser paradox. 

It must not indeed be imagined that the protective 
system which Adam Smith found in his day had so 
respectable an origin as a mistaken view of the public 
good. In the early days of royalty, when the king's 
prerogative was large and undefined, the monarch 
assumed the right of licensing individuals in the 
manufacture of certain goods, or the conduct of certain 

K 



I30 ADAM SMITH. 



trades. The grant of such monopolies was freely 
exercised by Elizabeth. But that prudent princess^ 
when in her later years Parliament remonstrated 
against these privileged traders^ abated her preten- 
sions. Her successor^ whose notions of royalty were 
more extravagant^ was forced to abandon the prero- 
gative altogether. But what the King relinquished^ 
the Parliament assumed^ and during the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries these privileges of sole trade 
were freely granted by the legislature. 

In order to support the woollen trade^ the export- 
ation of wool was made a felony^ and when this pre- 
posterous punishment was remitted, heavy penalties 
were still levied on this imaginary offence. The pro- 
hibition was continued for many years after the time 
that not a single ounce of British wool was employed 
in the manufacture of fine cloth. The legislature 
investigated the causes which led to the low price 
of wool^ and then discovered that^ acting, as always^ 
in the capacity of country gentlemen^ they had vir- 
tually been engaged in depreciating the value of their 
own produce. They had taken care previously to 
ensure the consumption of woollen fabrics by an Act 
of Parliament^ to which I believe no legislation offers 
a parallel. They did not^ perhaps could not^ despite 
their hereditary wisdom^ provide that every living 
person should be decently clad. But they made 
this provision for the dead. A law declared that 
every dead body should be buried in a woollen 
dresS; and the officiating clergyman was constrained 



ADAM SMITH. 131 



to certify that the provisions of the law had been 
obeyed. / 

A monopoly heightens the profits of an individual. 
But protection does not^ unless the number of persons 
engaged in the trade or manufacture is limited. The 
reason for this flict is found in an economical lavv^ 
that equal capitals, liable to equal risks, are remu- 
nerated by equal profits. Hence, if the price of ar- 
ticles is heightened by protection, the competition for 
producing the high-priced article increases^ and pro- 
fits are equalized. But when the protection is re- 
moved^ the trade is overstocked; and unless the 
market is greatly widened, and demand increased^ 
the change is sure to be attended by serious depres- 
sion. But^ as the reputation of English manufac- 
tures grew^ protection was found to be unnecessary 
and mischievous, and the mercantile community in 
this country was the first to claim the benefits of J 
free trade. 

Tlie case is somewhat different with agricultural 
produce. In Adam Smithes time England exported 
wlieat, and the economist thought^ with immediate 
reason, on looking at the circumstances^ tliat the 
earliest advocates of free trade would be tlic land- 
owners; the sturdiest remonstrants against it the 
mercantile community. He was, to a further extent, 
justified in this impression by the hostile attitude 
which the merchants assumed against Walpole^s 
scheme of establishing bonded warehouses. But the 
case was reversed when J^ni^land ceased to ex])ort 

K 2 



132 ADAM SMITH. 



coniy and the demand for labour increasing, began 
to depend on foreign supplies. Then it was seen 
that high rents followed scarcity prices^ and the Corn 
Laws of 1815 were enacted in order to stereotype a 
scarcity price and its presumed concomitant. 

But the violation of an economical law generally 
bears its own punishment, and that speedily. Any 
attempt on the part of a legislature to regulate the 
prices of a foreign product^, the same as that which is 
produced at home^ or similar to it^ induces violent 
fluctuations in the price of the home product. As 
long as the corn laws existed, agricultural distress 
was a perpetually recurring cry^ for nothing induces 
greater commercial derangement than great varia- 
tions in the price of products. The farmer was ruined 
by the machinery which was devised for his benefit. 
Nor was this the only result. As agriculture is a 
complex process^ the artificial heightening of one 
among its products is the artificial depression of the 
rest. And as rent depends on the profit of all pro- 
ducts, the landowners reaped no real benefit from 
protective legislation. 

The modern theory of protection as advocated in 
the United States^ in Canada^ and in our Australian 
colonies^ is far more subtle and socialistic in its 
character than the rough-and-ready system of com- 
promises for what are called peculiar burdens^ and 
the concessons to powerful interests which were the 
real basis of those protective arrangements of ours 
which lasted up to 1846. The latter were far more 



ADAJf SMFTIl. 133 



open to attack than the former are. They were ad- 
mitted to serve a purpose of public policy ; the sus- 
tentatioD^ namely^ of an institution which needs here- 
ditary wealthy in order to support hereditary privilege. 
When interpreted on economical grounds^ it was seen 
that they had no such value as w^as assigned them ; 
that they did not strengthen, but rather impoverished 
the social order in whose interests they were enacted. 
But though this was proved conclusively, and not a 
few able men among the persons for whose benefit 
these laws were designed, determined, from an en- 
lightened self-interest, as well as for patriotic reasons, 
to abandon these guarantees, the English corn laws 
died hard, and, in the opinion of many critics of 
political forces, required the accidental calamity of 
the Irish famine before they could be abrogated. 
The instincts of large communities are not so much 
conservative as impassive. They concede to reason 
long before they act upon the reason which they 
admit. There is in such societies a wide tract of 
indifference, between the sympathy which supports, 
and the antipathy which overthrows customs, — an 
indifference which ardent partisans underrate, and 
cynical critics exalt from acquiescence into admir- 
ation. There is nothing in the philosophy of politics 
more hard of interpretation than the question — How 
far are nations who submit to peculiar institutions 
prepared, on an emergency, to maintain them ? 

The Englishman who quits his native country, 
abandons his social traditions at once and for ever. 



134 ADAM SMITH. 



No nation of Anglo-Saxon descent has transplanted 
the institutions of this country to its new home; 
but almost all these nations or colonies have adopted 
the theory of protection which Adam Smith assailed. 
They allege^ in defence of this economical heresy, a 
variety of arguments. Sometimes it is said that the 
internal revenue can be collected most cheaply by 
such a process. Sometimes they aver that protection 
is needed for nascent industries, — a position for which 
they quote the authority of Mr. Mill. Occasionally 
they allege a political reason; that it is expedient, 
apart from economical considerations, to distribute 
employment as well as to accumulate wealth, and that 
a nation should be self-sustained. To the last state- 
ment there is one answer. It is an axiom which 
cannot be resisted, that there is no countervailing 
compensation for the breach of a natural law. No 
indirect advantage follows on a violation of public 
policy. In the political, as well as in the moral 
world, it is impossible to do evil and to succeed in 
achieving a good, to confer a real benefit by inflicting 
a real wrong. To the former reasons no answer need 
be given, for they deserve none. Only this we may 
say, that protection to nascent industries can never be 
so great a boon as the ultimate withdrawal of that 
protection is a certain loss. A permanent protection 
is no benefit to the protected industry, is a neces- 
sary loss to the community at large. A temporary 
protection is an injury to both parties; to the con- 
sumer first, to the producer afterwards. Abundant 



ADAM SMITH. 135 



illustration could be supplied for this position, both in 
past and present times. 

It is more reasonable to refer these enactments, 
made in the supposed interest of the State, or of in- 
choate industries, to the incidental compromises of 
party warfare. Did time permit, it would not be 
difficult to trace this influence in the protective regu- 
lations of the United States and Australia, and to 
show how much the apology of the present time is an 
after-thought, a mere explanation, intended to justify 
the claims of powerful and selfish factions. But as 
municipal government is a means to an end, that end 
being the due order of the State, so the imperial policy 
of an independent community is to be criticised, and, 
if need be, condemned, if it is seen to be unfriendly to 
the general good of the human race. Patriotism may 
be, and has been, the highest public virtue ; but it 
may also be, and more frequently is, a mask for sordid 
and narrow self-interest. It is the former only when 
it manifests itself on behalf of the common good of 
man, or is not at variance with that common good. 
Treating human nature from its economical aspect, 
Adam Smith did not discuss municipal or local pros- 
perity, but busied himself with the wealth of nations, 
with the means, that is to say, by which communities 
confer mutual benefits. 

I do not venture on asserting, as Plato did, that 
public affairs can be wisely and righteously conducted 
only when philosophers are rulers, and rulers philoso- 
phers, for the dissonance of philosophers is as marked 



136 AJDAM SMI TIL 



as the discord of parties. There must needs be, when 
the success of one or other among* rival theories in- 
volves the undue exaltation or the unfair depression of 
rival and important interests, a wise^ or at least an 
experienced^ arbiter. The wisdom and experience 
needed are gained for the most part by intelligent 
reflection on successive failures. The philosophy of 
government is gathered from the errors of historical 
administrations ; the science of political economy is a 
host of negative inductions^ collected from the falla- 
cies of a mistaken policy. Even were society less 
apathetic in dealing with these errors and fallacies 
during their existence and operation^ there is wisdom 
in the slow acceptance of fundamental changes^ in the 
cautious criticism of proposed reformations. Nor is it 
proper that those who think wisely and carefully 
should be indignant at the slowness with which their 
conclusions are accepted. If it be well to labour and 
succeed^ it is even better to labour and be patient. 
Among the vulgarities of vanity^ none is more vulgar 
than that which cannot say or do what is good and 
wise, unless the reward of approbation is forthwith 
and emphatically conceded. 

But it cannot be denied that civilisation has been 
more indebted to what the world calls philosophers and 
thinkers than it has been to rulers and administrators. 
The truth is manifest enough when we reflect on the 
progress which physical analysis and science have 
effected, and give their weight to the labours of the 
chemist; the mechanician, the geologist. Not less 



ADAM SMITH, 137 



noteworthy is the influence which the learning of 
publicists has exercised. The legal reforms of our 
(lay had their beginning in the speculative jurispru- 
dence of Bentham and Mackintosh. The doctrine of 
toleration was first taught by such students as Chil- 
lingworth and Locke. The interpretation of those 
conditions, which guarantee the fullest personal liberty 
with the greatest administrative vigour, has found no 
abler exponent than Mr. Mill. But the greatest 
achievements have been made by the English econo- 
mists^ who have^ under great disadvantages^ and in 
the face of strenuous opposition, reversed the policy 
which was once thought to be the highest^ the most 
undoubted wisdom. It must not be believed that 
their work is done; that there are no further con- 
quests to be made by this science^ whose operations 
have been so beneficent, though its conclusions often 
seem harsh and repulsive. But whatever may be 
done in future^ there is no doubt that successive 
generations of economical reformers will always 
honour^ as the most illustrious of their order, the 
Scotch Professor who sleeps in the churchyard of 
the Edinburgh Canongate. 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 



WILLIA]\I COBBETT. 



Ix 1783, everybody thought that the sun of 
England^s glory was for ever set. To those wlio 
recognised her reputation in her miHtary greatness^ 
the successful revolt of the American colonies seemed 
to annihilate her fame. To those who believed, as 
ninety-nine men in a hundred believed, that the 
colonial trade, regulated as it was by reciprocal ar- 
rangements, was the chief, if not the sole source of 
England^s wealth, the disintegration of the colonial 
empire was full of sinister omens. To those who 
believed in the balance of power, as nine hundred 
and ninety-nine men in a thousand did, it seemed 
that Great Britain was in danger of occupying a 
second-rate place in Europe. When Gibbon and 
Franklin were together in Paris, the latter sought 
an interview with the former. Gibbon replied that 
he had the highest respect for Franklin^s genius and 
abilities, but that he could hold no communication with 
a revolted subject. Franklin replied, that whenever 
the historian wished to commence a new theme, ^ The 
Decline and Fall of the l?ritish Empire,^ he would 
gladly afford him the materials. The retort was at 
the time believed to be as just as it was severe. 



142 WILLIAM COB BUTT. 

Great Britain recovered herself without difficulty^ 
aud ten years afterwards commenced a war^ the mag- 
nitude and duration of which dwarfed every other 
contest in which she had been before engaged. At 
one time she fought with all Europe^ as well as with 
the most indefatigable genius which the art of war 
has ever developed. She spent sums compared with 
u^hich her previous outlay had been trifling. She 
did what she had never done since the days of the 
Plantagenets^ landed an army in a foreign country, 
and won every pitched battle which she fought^ till 
she had entirely routed her foe_, and occupied the 
territory which she invaded. She annihilated the 
navy^ mercantile as well as armed^ of her adversary. 
She twice dictated terms of peace within the capital 
of France. Nor did she derive any material advan- 
tage from her victory. She paid for all she needed 
and used. She subsidized her allies^ giving high 
prices for generally worthless service. She came out 
of this great war too without aggrandising herself. 
One or two spots in the Mediterranean,, and else- 
where^ were all her acquisitions^ and these she kept^ 
because^ according to the judgment of the age^ she 
made Europe secure by these costly stations. 

It is not difficult to explain this revival. In the 
first place, the colonial system was a delusion. The 
only misfortune was that statesmen did not learn the 
lesson which the rupture with the American colonies 
could have taught them. They thanked heaven they 
had colonies left, and went on tinkering the reci- 



WILLIAM GOBBET T. 143 

procal legislation bctAvecn Canada and the sugar- 
growing islands on the one hand^ and Great Britain 
on the other. I do not discuss here whether the 
retention of colonies under the imperial sw^ay is a 
wise or a mistaken policy; but the whole civilised 
w^orld has at last learnt^ that when two communities 
agree to trade together exclusively^ and prohibit any 
other than mutual imports^ they deliberately make up 
their minds to lose on both sides. But the fallacy of 
reciprocity is so inveterate, that^ though the govern- 
ment of this country had before it the evidence of 
a growing trade between Great Britain and the 
American Union^ after the rupture of their political 
relations^ it clung to the reciprocity system till 
within a few years ago, when it abolished the dif- 
ferential sugar-duties^ and later stilly rooted out the 
last fibres of the colonial theory^ by remitting the 
duties on timber. 

The meanS; however^ by which Great Britain was 
enabled to weather the storm, and to ride triumphant 
out of the far heavier tempest of the twenty-two 
years^ war^ were the discovery and utilization of a 
natural force^ and the multiplication of labour by 
machinery. The strength of Great Britain^ from 
1780 onwards^ lay in the appropriation of the power 
of steam^ and in the marvellous economies of the 
spinning-jenny and the mule. Compare the cottager^s 
distaff and spindle^ the labourer's hammer^ the power 
of man's greatest muscular efforts^ with the loom of 
the modern manufactory^ and the vast but manage- 



144 WILLIAM COBBETT. 

able force of steam^ and you will be able to under- 
stand how prodigious are the resources which Watt, 
Ark Wright^ and Crompton opened up. It was hardly 
an extravagant boast, when Arkwright was reported 
to have said, that if Parliament could continue his 
patents, he would engage to furnish such ordinary 
revenue as might be annually necessary for public 
purposes. 

I do not know what are the reasons which have 
given rise to these late panics about the future indus- 
trial position of this country. On economic subjects 
men are apt to take the easy broad road of abstract 
reasoning, and to neglect the steep and thorny path 
of statistical induction. But I have been unable to 
find out any instance of mechanical genius in any 
other race but our own, except the solitary discovery 
of the carding-machine. This, beyond doubt a great 
invention, though it consists (like all great inven- 
tions) in a simple and obvious principle, was dis- 
covered by a Frenchman. As some of you are aware, 
its peculiarity is, that the fibre is delivered over the 
cylinder, instead of under it. It is said that the 
discovery was entirely accidental, having been sug- 
gested to the inventor by his seeing his daughters 
brushing their back hair. But I have found no other 
notable invention for saving human labour which is 
not the offspring of Anglo-Saxon thought. Other 
nations can copy, perhaps improve details. The 
Chinese are perfect in the imitative faculty; Con- 
tinental machinists have had some success in the 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 145 

management of particulars, a stage beyond Chinese 
intelligence : but they have hardly entered on the 
far higher path of invention. 

Adam Smith saw and stated clearly why it is that 
a manufacturing people has far greater strength for 
enduring the charges of a foreign war than another, 
the surplus of whose industry consists of what he 
calls raw produce. The value of manufactured goods 
consists in the labour which is, so to speak, condensed 
in them. As they represent greater value in less 
compass, they are more portable, and more readily 
permeate into the markets of the world. As they 
represent greater utility, because they are imme- 
diately available for current demand, they are more 
manageable as articles of sale. As they were at the 
time, to all intents and purposes, the sole produce of 
this countrv', they gave it an exceptional strength. 
Xo better example can be found of the power which 
her manufacturing supremacy gave Great Britain 
throughout this gigantic struggle than the utter 
futility of the Berlin and Milan decrees. Napoleon 
knew well enough that if he could cut off this 
country- from the markets of the Continent, he would 
seriously cripple her resources. But he miscalculated 
the strength of his police, as compared with the 
strength of that which his police was intended to 
exclude. He built, to be sure, a dyke, but he could 
not make it impervious to that which he strove to 
dam out. ^As water flows to the valleys,^ says 
Sanuto, the Venetian merchant of the thirteenth 

L 



146 WILLI A3I COBBETT, 

century, ^ so traffic forces its way into the channels 
which thirst for it/ Napoleon^s soldiers were clothed 
in the produce of the Yorkshire and Lancashire looms. 
His military chests were filled, at enormous sacrifices, 
from the hoards of British bullion-dealers. The loaf- 
sugar which he put into his coffee came from Bristol 
and London, quadrupled in price, because it was im- 
ported into France by way of Turkey. To have 
destroyed the foreign trade of Great Britain^ it was 
necessary to destroy the demands of civilisation^ to 
make society content with the coarse and costly 
makeshifts of barbarism. I do not deny that British 
commerce was stunted by the great war^ British wealth 
lessened from what it might have been ; but the 
resources of other nations were diminished in even 
greater degree by the constraint which was put upon 
their demands. Nor do I forget that there came, as 
there always does come^ a reaction from the feverish 
j)rosperity of the great war. When nations engage 
in hostilities^ the demand for the labour of those who 
are not actually fighting becomes urgent : wages are 
high^ profits are high. Everybody seems to thrive. 
The delusion that they are rendered wealthier by the 
waste of wealth occupies men'^s minds^ till the inevitable 
reaction overtakes them. This fallacy possessed our 
forefathers sixty or seventy years ago^ as it possessed 
our kinsfolk in the American Union four or five years 
ago. Men mistake feverish energy for real strength, 
and only learn their error when the fever gives way 
to exhaustion. 



WILL I A Jf COB LETT. 147 



There was^ however, one class of persons in this 
countrj^ who never tasted this factitious prosperity. 
These were the yeomen and the agricultural labourers. 
Between 1793 and 1815^ this country was visited by 
that series of bad seasons which seems to recur in 
some undefined cycle. In 1800 and 1801^ Great 
Britain was nearer famine than it had been since the 
terrible epoch of 1315-1316^ when the country was 
deluged by two years^ almost incessant rain. The 
people could not be relieved from abroad^ for the 
pernicious corn laws — less evil, indeed, than later 
enactments, but powerful for mischief — shut out the 
foreign producer. The exceptional sterility of the 
seasons, and the artificial famine which the law pro- 
duced, led to various expedients, intended to supply 
the continual deficiency of food. I remember, when a 
boy, that my father pointed out to me a field in 
Hampshire which was cropped for twelve successive 
years with wheat. Nor were the people ignorant of 
the causes of their misery. The longing for peace, 
before the short-lived truce of Amiens, I have learnt 
from the same authority, was intense and anxious. 

The French were not wholly unreasonable in their 
hatred of Pitt. Before the Revolution broke out, 
Pitt, a disciple of Adam Smith, was fully persuaded 
of the necessity of keeping up amicable relations with 
France. Walpole and he had been the only ministers 
who possessed even a conception of the true principles 
of taxation. The former attempted a reform, the es- 
tablishment of bonded warehouses, in which he failed. 

L 2 



148 WILLIAM COBBETT. 

The London merchants^ alarmed lest the competition 
of smaller capitalists should diminish their profits, 
offered a determined resistance to this measure of 
good sense^ and Walpole was obliged to abandon his 
project. Pitt was happier, and he made a change 
which has caused Great Britain to become the e7itre' 
j)6t of the world. He proclaimed a policy of peace. 
He set himself to diminish the public debt, and 
patronised the scheme of Price's sinking fund. He 
negotiated a commercial treaty with France,, on prin- 
ciples nearly the same as those which Cobden adopted 
eight years ago. He frankly accepted the situation 
in America^ and strove to cement by friendship the 
aflSnity which had been previously that of irri- 
tated dependence and ill-judged supremacy. At home 
he contemplated a Reform Bill^ studied the incidence 
of taxation, and resolved on revising the system of 
national finance. He was courageous as well as 
powerful ; confident in his own resources and popular 
with his countrymen. He was, it is true, opposed, 
but the opposition to which he was subjected merely 
urged him to greater efforts, was the healthy stimulus 
to a vigorous mind. 

Again, Pitt loved freedom. He reformed the law 
of libel against the licence of ministerial prosecutors, 
too soon, indeed, to return to those measures of re- 
pression in which he was finally outdone by Sid- 
mouth and Castlereagh, men who copied the worse 
parts of Pittas nature, as Vansittart parodied the 
desperate measures of Pittas later finance. He con- 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 149 

stantly and energetically opposed the slave trade^ 
even after he had retrograded from his earlier sympa- 
thies with public liberty. It is possible that the real 
reason which induced him to consent to the trial of 
Hastings was his detestation of the cruelties which 
that satrap committed_, though he has been charged, 
on insufficient grounds as it seems to me, w^ith meaner 
motives. It is certain that he denounced the Black 
Acts of the West India statute book, and believed 
that cruelty and vindictiveness in dealing with sub- 
ject races w^re neither policy nor justice. Wilber- 
force, that strange mixture of prejudice and benevo- 
lence, of piety and policy, was on thoroughly good 
terms w^ith him, and Wilberforce would not have 
honoured a man without a heart. 

But the vigour and virtue of Pittas heart and 
nature were not proof against panic, though he re- 
sisted the panic to which he ultimately succumbed 
for more than two years. In 1789, the Constituent 
Assembly, summoned by Louis XVI, met in Paris. 
There w^as abundant need, urgent need, for sweeping 
reform, and it cannot be denied that the Assembly 
went to it wdth a w^ill. They abolished primogeni- 
ture, w^hich, by the w^ay, never prevailed in France 
to the extent w^hich English custom has sanctioned ; 
they made taxation equal; they annulled feudal privi- 
leges, gave liberty of religious worship, took away 
the power of arbitrary arrest, granted universal suf- 
frage, made the administration of justice public, and 
appropriated Church-lands to secular purposes. The 



ISO WILLIAM COBBETT, 

condition of France was desperate,, and the remedies 
were searching and drastic. 

A year after the meeting of this Assembly^ Burke 
published his ' E-eflections on the French Revolution/ 
Never did any book produce such an effect. To be 
sure^ it was as the torch to gunpowder. The Court, 
the Aristocracy^ and the Clergy were immeasurably 
alarmed at the progress of the Revolution. There was 
some reason for their fears. King George was a re- 
spectable man^ whose private virtues made his political 
traits^ namely^ inflexible obstinacy^ joined to absolute 
unscrupulousness as to the means by which his end 
should be aimed at^ more mischievous than the vices 
of his children. His eldest son was a monster of 
meanness and profligacy; nor were the rest of the 
Royal family much better. One instance will sufiice. 
The Horse Guards^ always liable to sinister influences, 
were under the dominion of Mrs. Clarke and Nancy 
Parsons. 

The Peerage of the day was as worthless. The 
right of hereditary legislation was conferred on those 
who were able to return members for rotten boroughs. 
The Lowther of the time was made Earl of Lonsdale, 
for the sufficient reason that he controlled the repre- 
sentation of Cumberland and Westmorland, and their 
boroughs. How the Lowther had gained his in- 
fluence is shown in the history of Words worth^s 
family. The English aristocracy grew rich upon 
pensions and sinecures. Pitt, who was personally 
pure, suffered this to go on freely. Mr, Gold win 



WILLIAM COBBETT, 151 

Smith has adduced numerous instances of this form of 
peculation. A little pains would supply as many- 
more examples. 

Still more flagitious, however, was the conduct of 
the prelates. This was the age of those ecclesiastical 
cormorants, Tomline, Cornwallis, Moore. These men 
were as negligent of their duties, as they were rapa- 
cious after preferment. Never, perhaps, in the whole 
course of English history, was the English establish- 
ment so debased. There was some life in the Evan- 
gelical clergy, who were then discredited and per- 
secuted. The Dissenters, though tolerated, were 
politically powerless, and had to a great extent fallen 
from their austere rule. The followers of Wesley were 
poor ; those of Whitfield few, and without influence. 
Underneath this hierarchy lay a profoundly ignorant 
people. The Church and King mobs, the populace 
which could be stirred by fanatics, were found in the 
great towns, — such mobs as those who were roused by 
Lord George Gordon in London, and which sacked 
Priestley^s house in Birmingham. Society was com- 
posed of scum and dregs. In those days it was easy 
to commit the worst of political crimes; to enlist 
ignorance on behalf of injustice, to stimulate the 
sordid passions of one class in order that the sordid 
interests of another class might be protected and 
continued. 

This Burke did, unconsciously or wilfully. Some 
persons have tried to explain the Beaconsfield reflec- 
tions by the hypothesis that the author had suddenly 



152 WILLIAM COBBETT. 

gone mad. If a morbid egotism makes men mad, 
Burke was always mad. If sudden and ardent sym- 
pathy for any cause which is suffering, whatever its 
previous demerits were, is generosity, Burke was 
always generous. As there are men who always side 
with the stronger, so there is an impulse, rarer indeed, 
but more attractive, which induces other minds to 
side with the weaker party. It is probable that Burke 
knew nothing of the social state of France before the 
Revolution. It is certain that any man of sense 
would have acknowledged the evils which it con- 
tained, and the diflSculties which surrounded the em- 
ployment of remedies. It is still more certain that 
had it not been for the excesses which followed on the 
declaration of Pilnitz and the manifesto of the Duke 
of Brunswick, Burke^s declamatory invective would 
have had no lasting reputation, beyond that of its 
vigorous style, and the characteristic sincerity of its 
hyperbole. 

Burke^s known love of justice and hatred of op- 
pression assisted the intrinsic force of the work that 
he published. It was known that he had been a 
Liberal, a keen lover of his country, a generous friend 
to subject and wronged races. Viewed in the magic 
mirror which he put before the public, Louis XVI 
became, instead of a dull, well-meaning man, the chief 
business of whose life was that of repairing clocks 
and watches, a wise and judicious benefactor of his 
country, against whose prudent concessions a host of 
mad fanatics were striving; — the Queen, instead of 



WILLIAM COBBETT, 153 

being a frivolous intriguing* woman (to whom suffer- 
ing taught such dignity and fortitude^ that she after- 
wards became ahnost sublime)^ was spoken of as a 
radiant angel^ who cliallenged the worship of all true 
and loyal hearts ; — the worthless nobles, and yet more 
worthless clergy of France^ were noble cavaliers, and 
exemplary ministers of Christ. The Stuarts were bad 
enough, but they never bred a monster like Philip 
Egalite. The Church of Tomline and Cornwallis was 
sordid enough^ but it failed to produce such a wa-etch 
as Talleyrand^ bishop of Autun^ who fled from the 
diocese he disgraced when danger was near, took the 
pay of the Directory as a spy in the United States^ 
and was a traitor to every constitution and every 
ruler which France had. The English nobles during 
the days of Sandwich, Chesterfield, Thurlow, were 
licentious and heartless enough, but they were whole 
periods of development superior to the satyrs who 
thronged the French court. The peasantry of Eng- 
land were ignorant and debased enough, but they 
were civilised by the side of those hordes of savages 
whom the customs of the French monarchy had de- 
graded, and the energies of the French Revolution, 
stimulated by the atrocious proclamation of the Duke 
of Brunswick, ultimately let loose upon mankind. 

I know of l)ut one period in modern history in 
which a similar delusion, had it occupied a mind like 
that of Burke, and had it found utterance in the 
words of so great a master of rhetoric, might have 
produced equal evils. Seven years ago, there were 



154 WILLIAM COBBETT. 

men — good and otherwise prudent men — who de- 
fended the social system of the slave-holding States 
in the American Union^ who spoke about the chivalry 
of the South^ and^ ignoring the mean whites^ lauded 
the patriarchal relations of the master and the slave. 
Tiie same kind of reasonings the same misstatement 
of facts, the same ignorance existed in this country 
as made it possible for a defence of the Southern 
policy to appear respectable. Fortunately there was 
no Burke, and still more fortunately, had there been a 
Burke, the public was better informed. Even yet more 
fortunately there was no congress at Pilnitz, and no 
Duke of Brunswick, and no Directory liberated from 
slavery _, and suffered to run riot, under the joint in- 
fluence of new-found licence and ferocious panic. 
But there was a Pitt, ihough most fortunately he was 
not exposed to the same temptations, and therefore 
did not commit himself to the same reaction. 

For more than two years Pitt abstained from 
meddling in continental affairs, and therefore was re- 
sisting the anti-Gallican tendencies of the party whose 
interests he administered. He had every reason to 
do so, for he sincerely desired peace and economy, 
if for no higher reason, at least for this, that he longed 
to give his financial reforms a fair trial. No writer 
has illustrated this period of history more lucidly 
than Cobden, whose pamphlet ^ 1793 ^^^ ^^Siy must 
needs be studied by all who pretend to form an im- 
partial judgment on the question. Pitt, I am per- 
suaded, strove against the current with all his might. 



WILLIAM COBBETT, 



In the year 1792 he proposed reduced estimates for 
the military expenditure ot* the country, and all went 
well till the battle of Jemappes and the occupation of 
the Austrian Netherlands and Sayoy. 

Nor can there be^ I think^ a doubt of the motiye 
which finally drove Pitt into this reactionary career, 
— a motiye which Lord Brougham has stated with his 
usual clearness. Pitt was joined by the aristocratic 
^Vhigs, and was so far strengthened in Parliament. 
Had he, howeyer, united with Fox, he might haye 
baffled the war party. To haye done so, howeyer, 
would haye compelled him to share his power with 
a rival, to have divided his reputation with a political 
enemy. So he preferred war to peace, ambition to 
his country's good, supremacy to magnanimity. Re- 
presenting as he did in Parliament the faction which 
longed for war, which profited by it, and which was, 
under the unreformed Parliament, almost in posses- 
sion of the nation, (for in that day, according to Mr. 
Grey, 154 persons sent 307 members to Parliament,) 
he took a step from which retreat was impossible, he 
declared a war which could not and did not cease 
without dishonour, as long as Napoleon was victori- 
ous in Europe. Nor did the miseries of that era 
cease with the Battle of Waterloo. They continued 
for seventeen years aftei-wards, till tlie grant of Par- 
liamentary Reform. 

Those who commit themselves to reaction in politics, 
just as those who are renegades or converts in re- 
ligion, rarely go half lengths. Strafford is a note- 



156 ' WILLIAM COBBETT, 

worthy illustration of this rule, by the greatness of 
his apostasy, and by the severity with which that 
apostasy was punished. Pitt was no exception. He 
permitted a Reign of Terror in Ireland^ hardly less 
atrocious, though better concealed than the massacres 
of September, and the fusillade at Lyons. He per- 
mitted the reign of Dundas in Scotland, and revived, 
in part at least, the memories of the Stuart times of 
Claverhouse and Dalziel in Edinburgh. The country 
swarmed with spies and informers. When ministers 
pay for secret intelligence against their countrymen, 
and rulers smother the past in acts of indemnity, 
they are self-condemned. Sidmouth and Castlereagh 
continued what Pitt began, but by viler means, and 
with viler tools. It may be doubted whether Oates 
and Turberville were baser than Castles, Oliver, and 
Edwards. Sometimes indeed Pitt was defied and 
repulsed. In 1796 he prosecuted Home Tooke in 
vain, for a Westminster jury acquitted him. Adding- 
ton contrived afterwards to visit the grave offence of 
escaping a government prosecution by laying a 
penalty on the culprit and on the order to which 
lie belonged. Home Tooke was a clergyman, and 
we owe the law by which the clergy are excluded from 
the House of Commons, to the baffled rage of Pittas 
partisans. Habeas Corpus was suspended, the press 
was gagged, and the assault on public liberty which 
this minister perpetrated, had (according to Mr. 
Massey, the very reverse of a Jacobin in politics) no 
parallel since the worst times of the most tyrannical 



WILLIAM C()BJjL:TT. 157 

monarchs. In order to put down a spirit of revolu- 
tion in France^ the United Kingdom ran the risk 
of a eounter-revohition^ in which every liberty she 
had gained from the days of the Great Charter was 
in peril. 

I have given this rough and imperfect, but I hope 
just sketch of the social and political history of the 
time ; a sketch the outlines of which are taken as 
much from Alison and Scott^ as from Massey and 
Cobden; because, as I stated in a previous lecture, 
it is impossible to study political economy with profit 
unless one combines with it the philosophy and the 
facts of history, and gains an insight into social life. 
One part of political economy^ I repeat, that_, namely, 
which deals with the causes and conditions under 
which wealth may be produced^ is scientific in the 
highest sense, and may be studied^ but not studied 
well^ apart from illustrations. But every other expo- 
sition of the subject is hollow and unreal^ unless it 
takes note of such facts as those which I have re- 
counted. 

AVilliam Cobbett was born on March 9, 1762. His 
father was a small farmer who lived at Farnham, in 
Surrey. His grandfather was a day-labourer, who 
worked from his marriage till his deatli — which oc- 
curred a year before Cobbett^s birth — on the same 
farm. Beyond this, he did not trace his pedigree, or 
did not care to do so. His father seems to have ob- 
tained an education superior to tliat which generally 
fell to the lot of the sons of agricultural labourers. 



158 WILLIAM COBBETT, 

He thus raised himself a little in life. He had arith- 
metic enough to be a land-measurer^ and in these 
days of irregular fields^ and piece-work in harvest^ 
the services of such a person were constantly in re- 
quisition. So he prospered in his little wa-y_, for he 
farmed a small tract of land on the verge of the most 
fertile valley in the South, where the soil is twenty 
feet deep, and the hop^ our English vine^ grows 
luxuriantly^ and fills the air in early autumn with 
its fragrance. Here this peasant farmer brought up 
his four sons^ taught them such simple learning as 
he knew^ and boasted that his boys^ the eldest only 
fifteen years old^ could do as much honest work as 
any four men in the parish. Here^ too^ Cobbett 
learned his power of describing rural life^ — a power 
which no poet has rivalled, a power which he re- 
tained in all its freshness to the last day of his 
life. 

A little below the Thames^ at Weybridge, there 
commences a tract of moorland^ broken by the upper 
range of chalk downs at Guildford ; but continuing, 
in varying breadth^ till it reaches the lower range of 
chalk downs above Portsmouth. This range of hea- 
ther^ extending through Surrey^ and the borders of 
Hampshire and Sussex, contains alternately tracts of 
barren sand and gravely and valleys of surpassing 
richness. One of these valleys is Farnham^ the rich 
soil of which is sharply bounded by the unfruitful 
sands of Aldershot and Frensham. In this contrast 
of deseii: and garden Cobbett learned his love of rural 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 159 

life. Here he eiiltivated his keen sense of natural 
beauty^ and stored his memory with those pictures of 
rnde and cultivated scenery which he drew with such 
fidelity in his shop at Philadelphia^ New York^ or 
Pall Mall ; in his farmhouse at Botley^ and in his 
prison of Newgate. The soft outline of the downs^ 
the wide expanse of the heather^ the flow of the clear 
streams, the shade of the lanes^ worn down deep into 
the sand and gravel by the waggons which had passed 
through them for centuries, the hazel coppices^ 
stunted on the south-west by the Atlantic winds 
where exposed, or thriving luxuriantly in sheltered 
places^ the finches^ the nightingales^ in summer^ 
the fieldfares and plover in winter^ the heavily-laden 
orchards and brown cornfields were always before 
his ear or eye. He was a farmer when a politician ; 
and throughout the hot and bitter struggle of his 
life^ there were two kinds of Englishmen whom he 
always loved and laboured for^ the farmer and the 
farm-labourer ; the former not yet swollen into his 
present pretensions^ the latter not yet dwarfed into^ 
his terrible degradation. 

In these primeval times^ from which a real epoch 
separates us now^ the well-to-do yeoman hired most 
of his hinds by the year^ boarded and lodged them 
in his home, and sat at the head of his table when 
they dropped in at noon from their work to their 
dinner. The homestead contained its large low room 
on the ground-floor^ with its spacious chimney and, 
long bacon-rack, with the parlour door at one corner 



j6o WILLIAM COBBETT. 

of the great kitchen. This parlour was the mistress'* 
sanctum^ with its corner cupboards and treasures of 
old spoons and older china. Below the yeoman in 
wealthy but not much below him in station and 
plenty^ were the married labourers, most of whom 
cultivated some land of their own^ — cottage garden 
or small field by their houses ; and who^ in the gene- 
ral occupations of the farm^ were employed all the year 
through on varied work. Abject penury was well- 
nigh unknown; the terrible canker of pauperism had 
not yet eaten out the better part of the agricultural 
labourer's nature. 

Cobbett rose^ under singular difficulties_, many of 
which were of his own creation, from the condition of 
a farmer's boy to that of a member of the British 
Parliament. When a child of thirteen years old he 
ran away to Windsor^, and got employment in the 
king's garden there. Even here he began that self- 
education of his in hard coarse humour ; for he tells 
us that he spent his last threepence in buying Swift's 
^ Tale of a Tub/ and that when he lost the book at 
sea years afterwards^ he felt the loss more acutely 
than he ever did far greater calamities. He returned 
homo_, and when he was seventeen he was led by a 
sudden impulse to run away again. This time he 
went to London^ and when his funds were nearly 
exhausted, got a place as a lawyer's clerk. Then he 
tried to go to sea, but was rejected^ humanely^ it 
seemS; by the captain of the flag-ship at Portsmouth. 
At last, just at the close of the American War of 



?^ 



WILLIAM COBBETT. i6i 

Independence, he enlisted in a reg-imcnt which was 
recruiting for Nova Scotia. In a short time his 
diligence, shrewdness^ and punctuality were rewarded. 
Within a twelvemonth he was raised to the rank of 
serjeant-major, and was able to make considerable 
savings from his pay. In 1791 he obtained his dis- 
charge^ receiving, at the same time^ a high testimonial 
to character from his colonel^ w4io afterwards obtained 
an unhappy eminence in connection with 'the Irish 
outbreak of 1798^ for the colonel was Lord Edward 
Fitzgerald. After his discharge he married. 

Cobbett^s marriage w^as eminently characteristic. 
When he w^as in New Brunswick^ he saw^ on an early 
December mornings a girl, not more than thirteen 
years of age^ scrubbing a washtub in the snow^ She 
was the daughter of a soldier^ a serjeant-major like 
Cobbett himself. He resolved to marry her in due 
time. It seems that his project was favoured by the 
girFs father. Three or four years after he made this 
resolve^ the parents of the girl were ordered back to 
Woolwich. Cobbett^ thinking the risks of a residence 
in this town were neither few nor slight^ recommended 
her to take up her residence with some decent people 
w^ho w^ould board her ; and to meet this expense he 
handed her over all his savings^ amounting to 150 
guineas. They then parted for three or four years. 
When he returned to England^ he found her engaged 
as a maid-of-all-work in a family. She returned him 
his 150 guineas unbroken, and in a few weeks they 
were married. In the spring of 1792, Cobbett went 



1 62 WILLIAM GOBBET T. 

to France_, and applied himself diligently to learning 
French. Fearing the turn which the Revolution was 
likely to take^ he quitted the country and sailed to 
America^ appearing at Philadelphia in October. 

At first Cobbett maintained himself by teaching 
English to the French emigrants. In the early days 
of the French Revolution there was a close and 
friendly intercourse between the Americans and the 
French. The feeling was natural; for the latter 
had served the former at a very opportune time^ by 
declaring war against Great Britain during the crisis 
of the revolutionary war. This* intimacy was closest 
between the Democratic party in America^ — the party 
of Jefferson^ Madison^ and Monroe, — and the French. 
The Federal party^ the heads of which were Washing- 
ton^ Adams^ and Hamilton, were rather disposed to 
cultivate the friendship of Great Britain. The latter 
were on the whole in the ascendant, and had, in the 
reformation of 1787, given larger powers to Congress, 
besides handing over the executive, under certain 
checks and guarantees, to the President. But the 
contest of parties was exceedingly bitter. Such a man 
as Cobbett immediately felt himself in his element. 
According to his own account, which there seems no 
reason to doubt, overtures had been made to him by 
Talleyrand, who was then filling the congenial oflSce 
of agent and spy in the United States, under the 
cloak of a general dealer in New York. Cobbett 
rejected his advances. He had determined, as soon 
as possible, to attack the Democrats. How violently 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 163 

hostile they were to England^ is suggested by the 
whimsieal project of Thornton, who proposed that the 
language, since it coukl not be abandoned, should be 
put into masquerade^ by spelling all words phoneti- 
cally^ and by printing the letters upside down. 

Cobbett began his partisanship w4th a defence of 
Washington's treaty of amity and commerce with 
Great Britain. AYith him political writing was neces- 
sarily personal ; so he assailed Priestley^ Tom Paine, 
and Franklin, with a bitterness as novel as it was pun- 
gent, under the thin disguise of his favourite nom de 
plumey Peter Porcupine. He soon raised himself a 
host of enemies, as well as a circle of admirers. Some 
of the former took to traducing his character, and 
to circulating damaging statements about his previous 
career. To these libels he answered by giving the 
world a brief autobiography, into which, full as it 
is of that peculiar rural description of which he was 
so great a master, various passages of singular pun- 
gency are inserted. One of these passages, in which 
the writer glances at Franklin, may serve as a speci- 
men of Cobbett^'s style. He has been giving an 
account of his ancestry, which he is able to trace no 
further back than to his grandfather. 

^ Every one will, I hope, have the goodness to be- 
lieve that my grandfather was no philosopher. Indeed 
he was not. He never made a lightning rod, nor 
bottled up a quart of sunshine in his life. He was 
no almanack maker, nor quack, nor chimney-doctor, 
nor soap boiler, nor ambassador, nor printer^s devil. 

M 2 



1 64 WILLIAM GOBBETT, 

Neither was he a deist; and all his children were 
born in wedlock. The legacies he left were his scythe, 
his reap-hook^ and his flail. He bequeathed no old 
and irrecoverable debts to an hospital. He never 
cheated the poor during his life^ nor mocked them 
at his death. He has^ it is true^ been suffered to 
sleep quietly beneath the green sward; but if his 
descendants cannot point to his statue over the door 
of a library, they have not the mortification to hear 
him daily accused of having been a profligate, a 
hypocrite, and an infidel/ In this kind of hitting, 
Cobbett had hardly a rival, and certainly no superior. 
It is not marvellous, therefore, that, unable to cope 
with him in the use of the pen, his numerous enemies 
tried to crush him by other expedients, — by threats, 
by prosecutions, and by violence. Meanwhile he 
continued to increase the hatred felt towards him by 
acts of singular audacity. 

He opened a shop at Philadelphia, and, by way of 
showing his daring, he filled his windows with por- 
traits of George the Third and his ministers, of nobles 
and prelates. He denounced the Revolution in France, 
and the acts of the Convention, with as much savage 
bitterness as that with which any man might have 
reprobated the deeds of the Committee of Public Safety. 
He scoffed in unmeasured terms at the independence 
of the United States. He ridiculed the Constitution 
of the Union, and predicted the inconveniences which 
would ensue from its written and therefore inelastic 
forms. He held up to contempt the doctrine on which 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 165 

the Americans prided tliemselves, the democratic 
equality of all men, under a fable, the coarse humour 
of which has never been equalled. He compared 
society to the various vessels in a crockery-shop, and 
the republic in which he was living to the same 
vessels rendered uniformly worthless by being shat- 
tered into fragments of uniform value. But his 
bitterest scorn was reserved for English sympath.isers 
with American institutions. He received threatening 
letters. These he published in his journal. He added 
comments on them, not intended so much to sting 
the writers, for whom he cared nothing, as to hold 
up those institutions to obloquy which, he assumed, 
could alone produce such correspondents. 

Cobbett could hardly have been unaware that a 
fiftieth part of the political libels which he uttered 
in the United States would have been sufficient, in 
his native country, to bring down on his head the 
merciless penalties of Pittas gagging acts. He railed 
at transatlantic liberty with all the licence which 
that liberty allowed, with greater virulence than 
any other community has ever permitted. But it 
has constantly been seen that the fiercest enemies 
of popular liberty have always invoked and used the 
freedom which they assail. The men who after the 
Revolution would have coerced the press, uttered tlie 
most malignant libels against the Government which 
permitted free speech. Had Swift written a tithe of 
the calumnies against the favourites of James, which 
be published against the Whigs of the junto and 



i66 WILLIAM COBBETT, 

the Irish administratioQ of Walpole^ he would have 
been put in the pillory^ and been whipped at the 
cart's tail, as Oates was. Not that we need wonder 
or complain at this. When base and servile natures 
are emancipated against their will, they always at 
first abuse the benefits which are conferred on them. 
In this way^ and in this way only^ can they be 
schooled into the dignity and truthfulness of real 
freedom. Cobbett^ it is true^ was never servile^ and 
seldom base^ but he was intoxicated with the freedom 
of the institutions which h^ attacked. Had he been 
left alone^ he would^ without doubt, have exhausted 
his petulance. 

I said before that Burke,, from innate generosity, 
always sided with the weaker party. Cobbett fol- 
lowed the same course^ from an innate spirit of 
contention. The, self will of his youth, strong and 
resolute beyond parallel, had raised him from the con- 
dition of a farmer^s boy to that of a powerful writer. 
When he was little more than thirty years old, he 
had gained a name in both hemispheres — a far more 
arduous task than at present. He had but little 
knowledge of books^ and even less of other men^s 
thoughts. But he had a memory of singular reten- 
tiveness^ a keen eye^ an instant appreciation of the 
ludicrous^ a marvellous mastery over the English 
tongue^ and a unique faculty of inventing suggestive 
nicknames which stuck like birdlime. Added to 
these mental powers was an almost unique egotism. 
Some egotists become morbid ; but Cobbett^s egotism 



WILLIAM COBBETT, 167 

was always healthy. Some become ridiculous ; but 
Cobbett^s humour saved him from this risk. ^ I wrote 
for flime/ he says^ ' and was urged forward by ill- 
treatment/ He never lost sight of the fame he 
sought ibr^ and he never forgot the illtreatment 
which he endured. Once, and once only_, he made 
himself ridiculous. "When he returned from his 
second journey to America^ he brought back Paine^s 
boneS; and advertised gold rings^ each to contain 
a lock of that notorious republican's hair. His 
motion^ when he got into the House of Commons, 
that the King should be petitioned to strike off 
Peel's name from the list of the Privy Council, was 
the act of a man who is ignorant of his fellow-men, 
and mistakes his own hatreds for popular opinions. 
He gave the clue to this ignorance of other minds 
than his own, when he refused the Speaker's invita- 
tion on the plea that he was unused to the society 
of gentlemen. His egotism w^ould not allow him to 
defer to any man, in any place or in any company. 
The Speaker thought he was modest. He knew 
little of his man. 

The persecution which Cobbett underwent in the 
United States was a series of prosecutions for libel. 
Like most of these prosecutions, they w^re unfair, or 
at best a cloak for procedure against a man noto- 
riously unpopular, who must be crushed, no matter 
how. Cobl>ett had unluckily, too, made an enemy of 
the chief justice of the State; and in those days a 
judge was no mean foe when he nourished a grudge 



1 68 WILLIAM COBBETT. 

against prisoner or defendant^ prosecutor or plaintiff. 
Not indeed that the judge in the city of Brotherly 
Love was harsher or more unfair than Braxfield on 
the Scotch^ or Erskine on the English bench ; that 
Erskine whom Cobbett^ in later days^ delighted to 
designate by his second title of Clackmannan. 

The first prosecution which Cobbett defended^ (and 
he almost invariably conducted his defence in person^) 
was that on account of a libel against the King of 
Spain. It was certain that such a prosecution would 
fail, and it failed. But in the next case his enemies 
were more fortunate. 

A certain Dr. Rush had advertised a new cure for 
yellow fever. It consisted in copious bleedings and 
in prodigious doses of calomel. The doctor puffed 
his remedies^ and Cobbett^ eager for attack^ assailed 
him^ called him Sangrado, and published in his paper 
parallel passages from the physician^s method of 
treatment^ and Sangrado'^s conversations with Gil 
Bias. Rush prosecuted him, and laid his damages 
at 500 dollars. It seems that Cobbett foresaw the 
result of the trials for he migrated to New York^ 
declaring that while his old enemy was in power and 
office^ the issue could not be fairly tested. He was 
rights for the jury assessed Rush''s damages at 5000 
dollars. But Cobbett^ after all, vindicated his criti- 
cism on Rush^. for Washington fell a victim to the 
treatment of the Doctor. In New York, Cobbett 
published a new paper, under the name of ^The 
Rushlight/ in which he reiterated his libels on his 



mmmmmmmmmtmmmmmfiKf 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 169 

medical foo^ and after a short time came back to 
Eiig-land. 

With the exception of a few weeks, Cobbett had 
been absent from England for sixteen years. No 
contrast coukl be more marked than that of his social 
position at his departure and at his return. He left 
his country a common soldier, he returned to it one 
of the most powerful political writers in the world, 
the courageous advocate of English institutions, of 
constitutional monarchy, of Church and State, under 
the most untoward circumstances, in the face of the 
bitterest and most implacable enemies of the old 
country. He was immediately adopted by some of 
the anti-revolutionary Whigs, such as Wyndham. 
He took a shop in Pall Mall, and commenced his 
career as a journalist and publicist. Pitt, however, 
refused to meet him, and, as he never forgave a 
slight, he speedily found opportunities of resenting 
this act of contempt. 

It is not, I think, difficult to explain Pittas in- 
difference to a man who might have been, under 
judicious management, so powerful an ally. The 
Prime Minister was absolute in the House of Com- 
mons, so absolute, that people believed his resignation, 
the year following, was a mere act of dissimulation, 
intended to save his reputation for liberality in deal- 
ing with the Catholic claims, and for consistency in 
negotiating the short-lived and shameful Peace of 
Amiens. But Pitt cared little for the press. He 
cared^ it seems, in the height of his power, but 



I70 WILLIAM COBBETT. 

little for votes. He held his followers together by 
offices and pensions^ his party by dread of revolu- 
tionary France. He brought Canning into Parlia- 
ment. But for a short time Canning was well- 
disposed to the party of Fox. When he saw that he 
could get nothing except by the active support of 
his patron^ he abandoned his predilections^ and fal- 
sified Sheridan^s prediction. This sudden conversion 
of a young man^ afterwards famous for lampoons, 
made him the object of an epigram at the time : — 

' The turning of coats is so commonly known, 

That no one would think to attack it ; 
But no case until now was so flagrantly shown 
Of a schoolboy in turning his jacket.' 

But how could the author of the Gagging Acts^ of 
the Press prosecutions, of the Act of Indemnity, 
patronize a journalist ? 

Cobbett revenged himself by going over to the 
party of Burdett, Cartwright, and Hunt, by sneering 
in characteristic fashion at Pittas expedients and 
policy, and in particular by holding up the King^s 
family to contempt. His weekly ^ Political Register^ 
was commenced in 1802; and was continued, with 
few interruptions, till his death. But he still re- 
tained his hatred for revolutionary France, declined 
to illuminate his shop after the Peace of Amiens, 
and bore the smashing of his windows with his cus- 
tomary courage, having taken the precaution of 
getting his wife and children out of the way of 
danger. 



WILLIAM COBBETT, 171 

Politicians in the beginning of the present cen- 
tury^ when the laws were administered by men like 
Kenyou^ wrote with the sword of Damocles hanging 
over them. If one is astonished at their courage^ 
one is amazed at their virulence. Press prosecutions, 
however energetically conducted by governments^ are 
invariably failures as part of the machinery for re- 
pressing opinion, except perhaps vv^hen they are con- 
ducted by an agency like the Spanish Inquisition. 
We need not go to our neighbours across the Channel 
for proofs of this position^ for illustrations of the way 
in which inuendos^ which cannot be grasped by the 
hand of the law, are far more damaging than down- 
right open si^eech^ free criticism. Despotic govern- 
ments have silenced plain comments on their acts, 
only to suggest the more subtle attacks of fable^ 
parable, apologue, or tale. The satires of Juvenal 
are far bitterer than the philosophic romance of 
Tacitus. The gross apologue of Rabelais is more 
biting than the diatribes of Luther. You may find 
political satire in plenty in the fables of La Fontaine, 
and in the fairy tales of Hans Andersen. 

In Cobbett^s time the press was violently personal. 
A publication, in which Hunt and Cartwright were 
probably interested, called ' The Bhick Dwarf,^ 
lavished weekly abuse of the coarsest kind on the 
public men of the day. These papers circuhitcd by 
thousands, and were read with the greatest avidity. 
But no papers were more po])ular than the ' Porcu- 
pine,^ the ^ Regi.>ter/ the ^ Two2)enny Trash,^ and the 



172 WILLIAM COBBETT, 

^ Gridiron/ I have said that Cobbett was an adept 
in the art of suggestive nicknames. Such were Pros- 
perity Robinson^ Old Glory Burdett. In his later 
years he similarly vilified the two clergymen who 
promulgated and adopted the theory of population, 
Malthus and Mr. Lowe of Bingham, the latter the 
well-known father of a more distinguished son. He 
had an equal aversion to a living economist of great 
eminence in poor-law and sanitary reform, Mr. Edwin 
Chadwick, whom he always designated as Penny-a- 
line Chadwick. 

^The best remedy for the evils of liberty/ says 
a great and wise philosopher of our own time, ^is 
more liberty.^ Never was this adage more exactly 
verified than in the history of the political press. 
When the law of libel was relaxed, when the repeal 
of the infamous Six Acts of Sidmouth heralded fur- 
ther concessions to the right of free comment on 
public affairs, the tone of the anonymous press con- 
tinually improved. As more liberty was given, less 
licence was taken. It is not too much, I think, to 
say, that whatever are the evils of anonymous 
writing, (and it is a moot question whether it has 
done more good than mischief,) its evils were vastly 
greater under the repressive system of fifty years ago. 
It is sometimes said that statesmen should not yield 
to clamour, to sentimental grievances, to popular 
demand. It is a truer interpretation of the function 
of a statesman that he should face, on just principles. 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 173 

clamour^ grievance^ demand ; and should silence, 
satisfy^ concede each, if needs must^ by wise and 
equitable legislation. This is the canon of true pro- 
gress. For the art of the statesman is like that of 
the physician. It takes no action when the body 
is sound, it treats that disease only which it knows 
by symptoms. Fifty years ago men thought it 
wisdom to meet the disease by driving in the erup- 
tion. But experience teaches, as its best learnings 
that what was once thought wisdom, has been 
found folly. 

In 1800^ Cobbett was prosecuted for a political libel 
on Lord Hardwick and Lord Plunket. He was cast 
in damages to the amount of .^'500. But a further 
prosecution in 18 jo ruined and finally embittered 
him. Certain militiamen at Ely had been guilty of 
some act of insubordination. For this offence^ five of 
the ringleaders were flogged. The punishment, ac- 
cording to the brutal fashion of the time^ w^as severe. 
But the sting in Cobbett^s mind consisted in the fact 
that the 500 lashes inflicted on each of these offenders 
w^as superintended by a guard of the Hanoverian 
legion, then quartered in England. Cobbetf's wrath 
was roused^ and he poured his whole fury on the Ad- 
ministration. He was prosecuted^ sentenced to two 
years'* imprisonment in Newgate^ to a fine of ^1000 
to the King, and was ordered to find securities for 
good behaviour in a large amount. The sentence was 
probably intended to be fatal. Cobbett was passion- 



174 WILLIAM COBBETT, 



ately fond of his farm at Botley, and lived as much 
as he could in the open air. He loved his family^ his 
wife and children^ as men who hate earnestly love 
earnestly. He has left on record that he never 
uttered but once a harsh word to wife or child^ 
and that he bitterly repented of that one harsh word 
spoken to one child. He was sentenced to two years^ 
imprisonment in a filthy gaol^ in the filthiest part of 
London. 

He bore up^ however^ bravely. He wrote with un- 
abated vigour^ and directed the farm at Botley with 
untiring interest. Once, it seems, he tried to make 
terms. One Reeves gave in evidence^ ten years after 
Cobbett^s conviction^ that the prisoner offered to stop 
his ^ Register^ if he were released. His political enemies 
chuckled over this offer and refused it. So Cobbett 
continued his ^ Register/ and served out the term of 
his imprisonment. ^The Regent/ says Cobbett^ ^got 
the c^'iooo^ and no doubt held it in trust for his 
father.' 

On his release he was entertained at a dinner 
given by Burdett. When the guests lifted their soup- 
plates^ each found the reprint of a lampoon which, 
some years before^ Cobbett had written on his host, 
and which some waiter had been bribed to distribute. 
I heard this story from an uncle of mine, who was 
present at the banquet. The trick failed, however, to 
produce more than a momentary discomposure. Men 
who were political prisoners in Newgate fifty years 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 175 

ago got bronzed and ready in emergencies. After- 
wards, Cobbett wrote more lampoons on Biirdett. 

In 181 7, Sidmouth passed the Six Acts, the object 
of which was to further restrain the poHtical press. 
Cobbett fled to the United States, and lived for two 
years on Long Island, writing his ^ Register^ as usual. 
He averred that he fled to avoid the Six Acts. But 
he was also in debt to the amount of ^30,000. When 
in America, he wrote his English Grammar, and, with 
characteristic pungency, made his illustrations the 
vehicle of political jibes. In 18 19 he returned, with 
Paine'^s bones. He was again prosecuted, now by a 
private person, was cast in damages to the amount of 
j^iooo; Scarlett, with the keen enjoyment of a 
renegade, leading against him. He turned butcher, 
and soon became bankrupt. 

He stood for Coventry, and again for Preston, his 
rival at the latter place being the present Lord 
Derby. In 1830, aided by the interest of Mr. 
Fielden, he was returned for Oldham, and sat for 
that borough till his death in June, 1835. He made 
no way in the House of Commons, but rather 
damaged his reputation. He was buried in the 
graveyard of his native town. As a boy, I re- 
member the circumstances of his funeral, and the 
attendance with which the farmer^s son was gatliered 
to the grave of his forefathers. Elliott, the Corn- 
law rhymer, who had, in the smoky streets and 
wild moors of Lancashire, felt the keenest relish for 



176 WILLIAM COBBETT. 

Cobbett^s descriptions of the warm, rich^ sunny 
valleys of Surrey, sung of him — 

* And in some little lone churchyard. 

Beside the growing corn, 
Lay gentle nature's stern prose bard — 
Her mightiest peasant-born/ 

As a political writer Cobbett^ who occupied a first 
place in the criticism of current politics for more than 
forty years, had few rivals. He was a great master 
of that homely^ idiomatic English^ which is per- 
suasive by its very plainness and lack of ornament^ 
and which is exhibited in its perfection by another 
farmer^s son — another politician^ but also a statesman 
of the highest and noblest type. A fortnight before 
Cobbett^s death Cobden published his first political 
work^ under the title of ^ England^ Ireland, and 
America/ and in it^ using such English as Cobbett 
used, announced a policy which is now become identi- 
cal^ on the acknowledgment of all parties, with pru- 
dence and good sense. 

As a controversialist, Cobbett was constantly unfair 
from his vindictive violence. Men who have been 
persecuted are rarely tolerant ; the most patient 
martyr has often been the most savage inquisitor. 
Cobl)ett felt himself wounded, and he retaliated with 
ferocious energy. ^ He had,' says Hazlitt, ^the back 
trick simply the best of any man in Hlyria.'' He 
never hesitated in his revenge, and he continued it 
after revenge was indecent, as well as superfluous. 
He hated Castlercagh — most of Castlereagh's oppo- 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 



nents had reason to hate him — during' his life, and 
he gloated over the circumstances of Castlereagh's 
suicide after his death. Canning felt the blows of 
his bludgeon ; for Canning, like most satirists^ was 
sensitive. Lord Lytton calls Cobbett ^the con- 
tentious man/ but the adjective^ though eminently 
suggestive^ hardly covers the range of this writer^s 
controversial nature. He was vindictive, wit'i the 
greatest facility of retaliation. Some men^ like 
Wilkes^ are irresistible in repartee ; others^ like 
Canning, have a vein of polished irony; some, like 
Moore^ have a gay wit^ which pleases even when it 
stings the most, and is hardly offensive to its object : 
but Cobbett was capable of that harsh ridicule which 
springs from an unforgiving nature, and is unfor- 
given ; — which bruises instead of wounding; but 
which roused in its day whole masses of the people 
to band themselves against what they were taught 
to believe was wrong or selfishness. 

It may seem to most of my hearers that the 
politician is more prominent in Cobbett than the 
economist. I have^ it is to be admitted^ given greater 
prominence to the former constituent in the career 
of this remarkable man ; but, in truth, the sub- 
stratum of all Cobbett^s positive convictions was 
economical. He never swerved from his purpose, — 
that of undertaking the defence of the farmer and 
the peasant. As a consequence, his influence wns 
exceedingly great among the class from whom he 
sprung. 



178 WILLIAM GOBBET T, 

He denounced^ not wisely indeed (for he had little 
tincture of scientific method), the Corn Laws. He 
saw that the object which the framers of these 
famous statutes had^ was to keep up rents^ to stereo- 
type the price of food_, and to do this^ not necessarily 
to the profit of the farmer^ but certainly to the injury 
of the peasant. He knew that high prices of food 
do not imply high prices of labour^ and he dreaded 
the degradation of the English peasant to the level 
of the Irish cottier. His hatred of the potato^ as 
an article of food_, nearly equalled his hatred of 
Castlereagh and Sidmouth. He predicted the Irish 
famine as the inevitable consequence of using the 
accursed root, as he called it^ on which the Irish 
lived. When Brougham^ in the ardour of his edu- 
cational reforms^ was predicting that the time would 
come in which the English peasant would be familiar 
^\^th Locke and Bacon^ Cobbett retorted that he was 
far more anxious for the time in which the peasant 
would not need to put a lock on his bacon. 

But Cobbett could not^ or would not^ point out 
that the corn laws were as suicidal as they were 
unjust. He did not show that a farmer^s trade was 
multiform, that if he grew corn^ he also bred and 
kept stock, and that if an artificial price was put 
on the former, the value of the latter would be cer- 
tainly depreciated. The corn laws went further. 
They stimulated the production of one kind of grain 
only, and so low ered the price of the rest. Had he 
reflected on the economical circumstances which 



WILLIAM COBBETT, 179 

attended the sellish folly of the corn law^^, and liad 
he brouglit to bear his vig^orous good sense on the 
project^ he might have obviated^ in great measure 
at leasts the liateful system which Cobden overthrew. 
He liad such influence with the tenant farmers^ that 
he might have banded them together against the 
legishition which affected to be in their interests^ but 
which mocked them with the hopes of an unattain- 
able advantage. 

In one of his latest works he tells us^ that,, at 
Charlbury in Oxfordshire, every man who had been 
a farmer thirty years before^ was on the poor-book 
in 1835. He witnessed, with wondering indignation^ 
the gradual decline of the class which he loved, and 
to which he belonged by birth. He did not^ however, 
see how distinctly traceable this fact was to the 
system of precarious tenure^ of artificial legislation, 
and thereupon of perpetual and damaging fluctuations 
in the price of the agricultural staple. It may be 
the case^ as some economists think^ that the large 
system of cultivation is better suited to the conditions 
under which high farming is carried on^ than small 
cultivation can be. The hypotliesis is at least doubt- 
ful. But there is no doubt that this large system 
has destroyed the yeomanry and degraded the pea- 
santry of England. It is equally certain that the 
change has not been induced as a consequence of the 
economical principles with which it is supposed to be 
in harmony _, but in absolute defiance of them. 

The condition of the peasant is now lower tjjan 
N 2 



i8o WILLIAM COBBETT. 

it was even in Cobbelt^s time. In the days of Arthur 
Youngs the agricultural labourer was far better off 
than he is now. You who live in the centre of active 
industries, and among whom^ therefore^ the rate of 
wag'es in rural districts is heightened by the com- 
petition of manufacturing energy, have probably no 
conception of the stolid misery which is the unvarying 
lot of the farm labourer in the South of England. 
His w^ages have scarcely risen for the last twenty 
years. A few of his luxuries have been cheapened. 
Most of the necessaries of his humble life have been 
made dearer, (for the development of railway com- 
munication has equalized prices in town and country,) 
if indeed they are not^ owing to the regularity of 
the market^ cheaper in the former than in the latter. 
The prices of meat^ butter, cheese^ and milk are at 
present double those at which they stood twenty years 
ago in rural districts. The rate of house-rent too has 
increased^ and will it seems increase^ owing to causes 
on which I have no time to dwell now. The best 
proof of the depth to which the south-country hind 
has descended^ is to be seen in the formrition of 
clnldren''s gangs^ and in the increasingly early age 
at which children labour. 

Cobbett; during the great war^ and the reaction 
which followed upon peace, saw the beginning of this 
misery. He traced it^ in some degree^ to its true 
causes, the absorption of capital in the war^ and the 
limited demand for labour. The wealth of the 
country^ Cobbctt thought, with some reason^ was 



WILLIAM GOBBET T. iSi 

consumed in foreign expenditure, in foreign subsidies, 
and, in no small degree, in the profits of loan- 
mongers. Upon the latter functionaries he looked 
with intense disfavour. 

Like most men of warm sympathies and warmer 
hatreds, Cobbett believed in the possibility of remedy- 
ing these evils by communistic expedients. His 
^ History of the Reformation^ was an attack on the 
hereditary wealth of the Tudor nobles. His ^ Legacy 
to Parsons'' was an assault on the endowments of the 
Church. His quarrels with O^Connell, his abuse of 
Malthus, ^Ir. Lowe of Bingham, and Mr. Chadwick, 
were the fruit of his admiration of the old poor law. 

The poor law of Elizabeth was not a compensation 
for the loss which the people sustained by the sup- 
pression of the monasteries and the alienation of their 
estates. But it was .a consequence of this great 
social change. The wealth of these orders was rapidly 
dissipated by Henry VIII. The price which his 
courtiers and grantees paid for their possessions was 
as rapidly squandered. Upon this waste of public 
capital, came the debasement of the currency, to which 
I have already alluded. Agriculture was abandoned, 
and sheep-farming substituted in its place. The 
peasantry was unemployed and starving. Vagrancy 
was made a capital offence, but ineffectually. At last 
a poor law was the only refuge from brigandage. 
Pauperism, which hardly existed during the prosperous 
epoch of tlie eighteenth century, became the promi- 
nent evil of the nineteenth. In some parishes, every 



t82 WILLIAM COBBETT. 

sliilliiig of rent was absorbed in the relief of the 
poor. It was necessary that this system should be 
cheeked^ and that the remedy^ however sharp it 
might be^ should be found and applied. 

Malthus and the writers of his school advocated 
the most extreme processes. Cobbett thought that, 
granting the present appropriation of the soil, and 
allowing that the usurpation of the landowner^ as 
he conceived it^ should be undisturbed, the poor had 
an inalienable right to maintenance from land. 
' The right to land/ said he, ^ is founded in labour, 
and in labour only."' Labour is divorced from the 
land^ but it cannot be defrauded of its interest in 
the distribution of that which it alone has earned. 
To him, therefore^ the arguments of these economists 
was not merely distasteful^ but their plans were 
immoral and fraudulent. It was not the poor law_, 
he thought, which had degraded the labourer^ but 
misgovernment and reckless expenditure. It was not 
an attempt to better his condition by wholesome 
severity^ which Malthus and Lowe advocated, but the 
relief of the landlord's rent^ and the saving of the 
parson^s tithes. ^ 

Fortunately^ Cobbett and those who reasoned with 
him were foik^d. Workhouses are no longer the 
warrens in which hereditary paupers are bred and 
brought up^ but penitentiaries to the able-bodied^ 
refuges for the aged and sick. It is true that the 
issue of the workhouse system is not tried by its 
success in discouraging the relief of capable workmen 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 183 

by means of a public charity. The question is yet 
unsettled^ whether or no the agTicultural labourer 
is not entitled to some compensation as a set-off to 
those laws and customs which have annihilated his 
interest in the soil ; but no one in these days doubts 
that^ whatever that compensation should be^ it cannot 
and should not be a system which wholly destroys 
any restraint of prudence^ every impulse of self- 
reliance and independence. 

Cobbett denounced the paper money of the war^ 
and the expedients adopted by Peel^ for the resump- 
tion of cash payments after the war was over. The 
former had^ he thought^ been a great advantage to 
the moneyed classes^ the latter was an attempt to 
secure the gains which thg same body of financiers 
had accumulated during the war. With his customary 
rashness of political prophecy _, he predicted that cash 
payments would never be resumed^ and published his 
' Gridiron^ in order to sustain his views. The resump- 
tion of cash payments was necessary and just. But 
Cobbett was to some extent in the right. Great dis- 
tress followed on the legislation of Peel. As usual^ 
the agricultural interest suffered^ was clamorous^ and 
was heard ; and we owed the latest sliding-scale to 
their importunities. 

It would carry me far beyond the limits which 
time imposes on an evening lecture, if I were to 
attempt a fuller sketch of England at the day of 
Cobbett^s death, and England in our own immediate 
present. It is sufficient to say, that though some 



1 84 WILLIAM COBBETT, 

interests have suffered — those, unhappily, which needed 
elevation the most, — the material progress of the 
country has on the whole been rapid and continuous. 
Prosperity has followed on wise legislation^ for it 
is an axiom in politics, that the w^age-earning* classes 
have a far greater interest in wise government and 
public morality than their w^ealthier fellow-country- 
men. The sinister predictions which accompanied 
the reforms of the last forty years have been falsified, 
and would be forgotten^ were they not invariably re- 
suscitated when other changes are demanded and 
impending. And above all, the United Kingdom 
has been fruitful in brave and wise men, whose public 
life has stood out in marked contrast to the Church- 
men and Statesmen of Cobbett^s stormy retrospect. 

Again, it is not easy to discover what are the 
special influences which the career of such a man 
exerted over the age in which he lived, and over that 
which succeeded it. It was impossible that a popu- 
lar writer, w^ho played so notable a part on the public 
stage, should fail of aiding the forces out of which 
society has grown to its present stature and form. 
At least, Cobbett familiarised the people with the 
most effective kind of popular education, that, namely, 
which criticises public events and public characters. 
If he was not the progenitor of the free press, he was 
at least one of its eldest sons. It is true that he dis- 
figured his vigorous English by personalities, and 
injured his own reputation by his unreasoning and 
ferocious animosities, l>ut he had a hearty love for 



WILLIAM C0BBET1\ 185 

his country and his countrymen, and a readiness to 
strive for what he believed to be the right. For no 
popuUirity can be enduring which does not lay its 
foundations in a real interest for the public good, 
though the means may be taken in error, and the 
effect marred by lack of experience. In Cobbett^s 
nature the good preponderated vastly over the evil. 
The influence of his writings was on the whole 
beneficent, for it was pure, earnest, honest. His 
many blemishes, both of mind and temper, pre- 
vented him from being great. The faults of his 
education led him into many a hasty judgment. But 
he kept alive much that was true and just in an age 
when tiTith and justice were reduced to struggle for 
existence. We may be sure that there was much that 
is worthy in a man whose writings were read by 
millions during his life, and whose coflSn was followed 
by thousands when he was laid in the sepulchre of 
his fathers. 



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